April 2004
Beginner
314 pages
8h 27m
English
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Foreword
This is a book about two revolutions: free software and free wireless networking.
The first revolution was born in 1991, when a lone Finnish hacker named Linus Torvalds used the GNU Project’s free C compiler to build Linux, a free Unix-like operating system kernel. One of the hallmarks of this kernel was its release under the GNU Public License, which guaranteed that anyone would be able to customize and improve the Linux kernel to suit their computing needs, and that those improvements would be shared with the other users of the Linux kernel.
Today, Linus Torvalds is virtually a household name, and his brainchild has gone on to star in millions of personal computers, web servers, supercomputing clusters, embedded devices, mainframes, and more. Bolstered by the success of Linux and its BSD-derived cousins, a globe-spanning Free Software movement has taken hold, spawning thousands of community-supported projects, and fundamentally altering how software is made and distributed in the 21st century.
Although the second revolution has been lurking in the background for years, it received a major boost in 1999 from the publication of the IEEE 802.11b standard, a specification for wireless data networking that made use of the 2.4 GHz microwave band, which had long been considered “junk” spectrum in the U.S. As consumer 802.11b devices hit the market, more and more people were able to use computers and access the network from an ever widening array of locales—living room couches, ...
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