Wind River Linux and the Yocto Project…Sowing the seeds of change

The year was 1998, I was walking through the aisles of a book store on campus at the Politecnico of Milano and a box of software caught my eye. It looked unconventional, sort of "homemade" and on its cover was an image of a man with a red hat.

It was Red Hat 5.2, and the box was big, much bigger than the bunch of DVDs inside would have justified. And heavy. Once I cracked it open, I figured out why – it included a thick manual that contained seemingly endless pages of instructions and mysterious lists of software packages.

It was 1998, and open source was starting to make its first serious steps into a world which, only a handful of years later would change dramatically. A revolution was about to begin.

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