A Life in Open Source, with Brian Behlendorf

Brian Behlendorf came from a science and technology background. In fact, his parents met at IBM where his father was a Cobol programmer. During the 1980s, Brian was comfortable in front of a TRS 80 and a PC junior doing basic programming and term reports.

He quickly found his way onto Usenet and participation on mailing lists around the band REM or the record label 4AD. This eventually turned into a dedicated mailing list focused on the rave scene in San Francisco. Through setting up the mailing list, he stood up an FTP server with DJ sets, which eventually became a gopher server, which eventually became a a web server that was dedicated to electronic music and the electronic music scene in the Bay Area.

This was a time when you would only hear electronic music at certain events and not on the radio. Brian continued to go to school at UC Berkeley occasionally, but in January 1993, something else caught his attention. The first issue of Wired Magazine was published.

From the Linux Foundation offices in New York City, this is The Untold Stories of Open Source. Each week in our podcast project on GitHub, we uncover the history and people behind the open source projects that are the foundation of technological innovation. If you work with open source, and you do whether you know it or not, you’re in the right place.