Thank you Ubuntu and Linux Communities

The Internet Archive is wholly dependent on Ubuntu and the Linux communities that create a reliable, free (as in beer), free (as in speech), rapidly evolving operating system. It is hard to overestimate how important that is to creating services such as the Internet Archive.

When we started the Internet Archive in 1996, Sun and Oracle donated technology and we bought tape robots. By 1999, we shifted to inexpensive PC’s in a cluster, running varying Linux distributions.  

At this point, almost everything that runs on the servers of the Internet Archive is free and open-source software. (I believe our JP2 compression library may be the only piece of proprietary software we use.)

For a decade now, we have been upgrading our operating system on the cluster to the long-term support server Linux distribution of Ubuntu. Thank you, thank you. And we have never paid anything for it, but we submit code patches as the need arises.

Does anyone know the number of contributors to all the Linux projects that make up the Ubuntu distribution? How many tens or hundreds of thousands? Staggering.   

Ubuntu has ensured that every six months a better release comes out, and every two years a long-term release comes out. Like clockwork. Kudos. I am sure it is not easy, but it is inspiring, valuable and important to the world.

We started with Linux in 1997, we started with Ubuntu server release Warty Warthog in 2004 and are in the process of moving to Focal (Ubuntu 20.4).

Depending on free and open software is the smartest technology move the Internet Archive ever made.

1998: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Archiving-the-Internet-Brewster-Kahle-makes-3006888.php

Internet Archive servers running at the Biblioteca Alexandrina circa approximately 2002.

2002: https://archive.org/about/bibalex.php

2013: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/26/brewster-kahle-internet-archive

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2021: Internet Archive

18 thoughts on “Thank you Ubuntu and Linux Communities

  1. Gannon (J) Dick

    Well said Internet Archive, well done Ubuntu.

    PS I doubt I would have much luck with the Website Form Field so I left it blank.
    If you want the inside scoop …
    https://127.0.0.1 … (HTTP 302) … https://127.0.0.1

    In other words from “my” stuff to “our” stuff
    “reliable, free (as in beer), free (as in speech)” as somebody once said

  2. Isk

    Ubuntu is the masterrace of PC masterrace, surprisingly user-friendly as well as free and modifiable, I’m really amazed of just how much it managed to contribute to so many projects, like and unlike internet archive.

  3. Luke

    Let’s not forget the security advantages of not using (impossible to audit) closed source software. Best defense against both governmental (policeware) backdoors and corporate (ad tracking/data harvesting) backdoors is for all software to be subject to potential audit by mutually opposing parties. This is only possible with publicly accessable source code.

    When I lost a computer to a raid in 2008, I was damned glad it was an encrypted Ubuntu machine and not something “encrypted” by Microsoft Windows or some other backdoored closed-source software. It was to my knowledge never successfully cracked.

  4. Leighton Delgado

    As a Ubuntu user since 2005 in various forms (currently Linux Mint), I have to compliment you on your choice of server OS. Ubuntu definitely changed my computing life and Archive.org has been my research platform for many years now. I couldn’t imagine conducting my historical research without your organization.

  5. Don C.

    From a Linux user… I started out with Slackware Linux in the early 90s. I am old and lazy now and prefer Linux Mint over all the other distros. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is based on Debian. Debian and Slackware both originated around 1993. They were the pioneers, not forgetting Mr. Torvalds. It would seem that while you praise Ubuntu you could offer a slight taste of “thank you” to the Debian Community for all their work. After all, if it weren’t for Debian there would be no Ubuntu. Just saying…

  6. Don C.

    Fair enough… I will always have a fondness for Deb & Slack. I won’t begin to deny that Ubuntu has polished Debian just as Mint has polished Ubuntu. The main intent of my post was in giving the Old Timers the credit they deserve. Keep up the good work!

  7. giso

    I have to compliment you on your choice of server OS. Ubuntu definitely changed my computing life and Archive.org has been my research platform for many years now. I couldn’t imagine conducting my historical research without your organization.

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