Sun and Oracle donated technology and we bought
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2025 9:21 am
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, 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 special database 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.
When we started the Internet Archive in 1996, 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 special database 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.