Robin “Roblimo” Miller over at Devx blogged about Frank Zappa’s influence on Linux.
Zappa was a lot of things to a lot of people, but he wasn’t a programmer. His influence on Linux was obviously through his music.
Miller wrote about Clay Claiborne of Cosmos Engineering. Claiborne was the first person to sell a pre-loaded Linux server. In the early 1990s, that was a big deal.
Miller asked if he was influenced by Zappa.
“Of course,” he says. And he still is, not just because of the counterculture thing, which is why Clay originally got involved with Free Software, but also because Clay has lived in the Venice Beach section of Los Angeles for many years, where a certain amount of homage to the Mothers of Invention is almost a residency requirement: “Of course.”
