Yggdrasil System

Lore & Background

Yggdrasil Computing, Incorporated was founded by Adam J. Richter in Berkeley, California. Richter started the company together with Bill Selmeier. Richter spoke to Michael Tiemann about setting up a business, but was not interested in joining forces with Cygnus. Richter was a member of League for Programming Freedom. The company's motto was "Free Software For The Rest of Us". Yggdrasil is the World Tree of Norse mythology; the name was chosen because Yggdrasil took disparate pieces of software and assembled them into a complete product. The company published some of the early Linux compilation books, such as The Linux Bible: The GNU Testament (ISBN 978-1883601201), and contributed significantly to file system and X Window System functionality of Linux in the early days of their operation. The company moved to San Jose, California in 1996.

Reader's Guide

The company remained active until at least year 2000, when it released the Linux Open Source DVD, but its website was taken offline afterwards and the company has not released anything since. The company's last corporate filing was in January 2004. The California Secretary of State lists it as suspended. In 1996, Yggdrasil Incorporated released the Winter 1996 edition of Linux Internet Archives. Six CDs of Linux software from Tsx-11 and Sunsite, the GNU archive on prep.ai.mit.edu, the X11R6 archives including the free contributed X11R6 software from ftp.x.org, the Internet RFC standards, and a total of nine non-Yggdrasil Linux distributions. The company once made an offer to donate 60% of the Yggdrasil CDROM sales revenues to the Computer Systems Research Group, but founder Adam J. Richter later indicated that the company would lose too much money and changed the offer accordingly, while still maintaining donations to CSRG. The company also had volume discount plans. Richter was using only a 200 MB hard disk when building the alpha release of LGX, which prevented him from practically being able to include the source code of some of the packages contained in the CDROM.

Did You Know?

• By 22 August 1993, Yggdrasil had sold over 3100 copies of the LGX beta distribution.
• The production release version cost US$99, but was free to any developer whose software was included on the CD.