The Linux.com Article Database

Once upon a time, at the end of the last century, there was a great web site serving the early Linux community, called Linux.com. Every day on Linux.com, dozens of volunteers from the Linux community would spend many hours of their time writing new articles, moderating comments and generally keeping the site looking like a professional resource, attracting several hundred thousand page views each day.

Unfortunately the original incarnation of the community site was shutdown in 2001, and for years was replaced with a mostly automated system that pulls content from elsewhere on the web. The site today is operated by the Linux Foundation (with which this site has no affiliation).

One of the key things that made the original Linux.com great, however, was that the vast majority of content on the site was published under the Open Content License. This allows for anyone to reproduce the content for free, providing the terms of the license are met.

On that basis, I've decided to re-publish (almost) all of the items that were in the main Linux.com database at the point at which it ceased to publish new content (October 2001). This includes news items and internal Linux.com announcements as well as full length articles; basically anything that was in the news/article system.

This gives the volunteers a chance to find a copy of their work, and also keeps the content available for the rest of the Linux community to benefit from and away from the bit-bucket.

Thank you to all those who contributed to the site!

Some links to archive.org of the original site:

If you find an item that shouldn't be here, then please let me know.

How Linux.com used to look

Four snapshots of the site as it evolved between roughly 1999 and 2001 (click for full size) were captured by Garrett LeSage (ex-Linux.com art director)

Find an article

You can do one of three things to find old articles:

Search by Author
Use the Category Browser
Or use the full-text search below.

Full text search

Article-o-matic

Gifts and Responsibilities

To end the run, so to speak, Linux.com has chosen this short but heartfelt opinion article by volunteer staff member, Derrick H. Lewis. Lewis' descriptions of the nature of his Linux.com volunteerism and other lessons learned after caring for his mother during a recent serious illness are quite fluid and genuine. We find this short but powerful statement of love for Linux and the open source movements to be an appropriate end to this particular week. Derrick H. Lewis writes from a high school in the USA.

(26/Oct/2001)