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Comment by drinchev | Hacker News Reader

Although I’ve read this probably a dozen times. What I think about this today, as I’m about to reviel my next project is that it’s so crazy how things evolved for open source. Nowadays people compete with companies and having an announcment like this usually includes :

- website explaining as a pitch what is better about your software

- ready to use examples and templates to support your claim

- branding with a logo that makes you look more professional

- issue tracker

- github repository ( even mirror of yours )

- bugfree software ready for production from day one.

And many more which I probably miss.

Writing something “cool” nowadays is not enough to be taken from the folks seriously.

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And yet with all that ... I likely still won't understand what exactly the product or thing is or does.

Meanwhile I understand Linus's email well enough.

That's probably due to OS is much more well known than some random open source software.

Probably more because Linus is pretty much bs-free (for the better and worse).

I can't count the number of times I've read an announcement of some OSS project, gone to the project home page, read it all and still had absolutely no idea what it was, what it did or why it might be important.

It is impressive how much Linus had working at that point though. Getting bash and gcc working and a multithreaded FS is no mean feat, and is enough for other people to actually make useful contributions without excessive pain.

It probably means you're not the target audience.

While this may be true, it can still be helpful to have an FAQ, context, or other way that interested parties can understand applicability.

I fully appreciate shorthand/jargon are ways to communicate complex ideas swiftly. Yet, taking time to provide some form of entry point for the uninitiated shows a disciplined approach that often translates to other areas of the project.

Most often it is that the author is so involved they forget to given enough context. They are so passionate about a topic, but don’t realize that others do not drink the same Kool-Aid every day.

More than half of the emails I get from technology companies fail to start with a reminder of what their product or service does. I see this much, much less frequently with consumer products — better marketing.

I usually have to go to Wikipedia to learn what a project is about, since their format puts the info in the first couple paragraphs.

If a project is not (yet) there, it's either Github, because markdown readmes somehow force the crux of the matter out of people… or it's goodbye.

It is impressive how much Linus had working at that point though.

Particularly when you consider that he had to do it all on bare metal.

I think that is a little simplistic, the main thing that got Linux going was sustained and continued effort. If this first message had been a flop Linus would likely have continued working and pushing it through. It was almost a decade before Linux could be considered a "real" operating system ready for production.

I can hear RMS right now... "It's GNU/Linux."

Reimplementing the humongous GNU toolchain would be totally worth it just to stop reading that line over and over again.

Less than a decade by far.

It was already in wide spread use amongst the small dial-up ISPs by 1995.

The bulk of the .com era was still on SUN and commercial Unicies. Linux was still in its early adopter phase. It was only in the 2000s that it started to get widespread adoption.

Eh, I can't agree. Lots of projects that grow up to be successful start as just a GH repo with a decent Readme.

It's very common now for a brand new project that's not even at a raw alpha quality to have a fancy logo. It feels like priorities can get out of whack sometimes.

Some would argue that you should be trying to market what isn’t ready yet, to see if people are actually interested. What’s wrong with having a logo to let people know you’re serious about the project and that if it gains traction it has less of a chance of being yet another abandoned github repo?

Yeah, that is fair. I think it depends on how you look at it. For me when I see a very early project with a shiny logo it feels to me like the author is more interested in getting popular than building something. But maybe I'm just jaded.

> Writing something “cool” nowadays is not enough to be taken from the folks seriously.

Linux' success was not due to this message. I mean, the message advertised a toy OS in a group devoted to toy OSs, which naturally helped attract contributors, but it wasn't sue to that post why nowadays half the world runs on linux. Linux was also not the only FLOSS OS kernel out at that time, nor was it even working. In fact, arguably what made linux the success was the fact that, years later, they managed to get a working UNIX clone to run the full GNU stack, thus providing just enough features to offer a tool with practical use for a very specific use (servers).

Even then the main driving force wasn't the kernel itself but the distributions that managed to provide convenient software bundles that users could simply pickup and test and use. For those projects, providing those websites and templates and howtos and videos and tutorials was essential to get their foot on the door,because otherwise the barrier to entry would remain high and higher than any of their competitors'.

I dunno, whenever I hear about a new piece of OSS it seems to already have a bunch of users saying they used it here there and everywhere

> Writing something “cool” nowadays is not enough to be taken from the folks seriously.

You don't have to be taken seriously by serious folks. You just need some folks to like it - or be intrigued.

The other thing is that the gap in the market can be more important than the product itself. So, the first version can be absolutely terrible...

e.g. People want free unix.

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