A tech writer who still counts on her fingers and toes, tries to wrap her head around the size of the Linux kernel, and wonders when its weight will cause it to crash through the Earth’s mantle. She’s being silly, of course. Or is she?
An interesting factoid caught my eye in an article published by Opensource.com this morning. The article was one of those interesting and easy-to-read listicles that many websites — even FOSS Force — likes to run occasionally called 9 Lessons from 25 Years of Linux Kernel Development, and the item that caught my attention was eighth on the list, under the heading, “The kernel shows that major developments can spring from small beginnings.”
“The original 0.01 kernel was a mere 10,000 lines of code; now it grows by more than that every two days. Some of the rudimentary, tiny features that developers are adding now will develop into significant subsystems in the future.”
10,000 lines of code added every other day? Really?
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux