| Connect jimfhall
Minnesota
Jim Hall is an open source software advocate and developer, best known for usability testing in GNOME and as the founder + project coordinator of FreeDOS. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.
Authored Comments
We learned after the fact that the AIX kernel was causing a problem with the IBM Java garbage collector under heavy load. (I'm sure it has been fixed by now - this was in 1999.) But that problem didn't happen with Linux and IBM Java.
We re-purposed the AIX servers to run databases instead.
What I didn't mention in the article is that Linux inspired me to create FreeDOS. I first started using Linux in 1993. A year later, Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows would do away with MS-DOS. At that moment, I thought "A bunch of programmers on the Internet got together to create a free version of Unix. How hard could it be for us to do the same with DOS?"
That thought was the origin of FreeDOS. Without Linux, I don't think we would have created the FreeDOS Project.