September 17 in business history: a kernel with no price, an $800 million launch day, and a league nobody paid to join

Three products left their makers on the same calendar day, decades apart: an operating-system kernel in 1991, a video game in 2013, and a professional football league in 1920. Each one was the whole of its own announcement on the day it shipped. Each one also left its lasting money somewhere other than the thing that shipped — with the companies that packaged and supported the free kernel, with the online service stapled to the game, and with the collective that sold the league's broadcast rights and split the proceeds across its clubs.

On September 17, 1991, Linus Torvalds, a computer science student at the University of Helsinki, prepared version 0.01 of an operating-system kernel he had been writing as a side project and uploaded it to ftp.funet.fi, the FTP server of the Finnish University and Research Network 1. The upload carried no announcement, and the code could not run on its own: compiling and testing it still required Minix, the teaching system it resembled 1.

The public statement of intent had come three weeks earlier. On August 25, 1991, Torvalds posted to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones" 1. Torvalds pinned the September 17 date down only in 2016, when the makefile of the first release was found stamped with it; the project's official birthday stayed August 25, the date of the post, because the code drop itself was never announced 2.

The terms arrived over the following months. The licence Torvalds wrote for himself barred commercial redistribution; with version 0.12, in January 1992, he moved the kernel to version 2 of the GNU General Public Licence, effective February 1 1. Version 1.0.0 followed in March 1994 with 176,250 lines of code and was the first release considered suitable for a production environment 1.

The kernel itself never earned Torvalds a retail dollar. The businesses formed around it did. Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor, sold 6 million shares at $14 on August 11, 1999 and closed its first day at $52.06, a capital value near $3 billion raised against an original plan of $60 million to $72 million; the raised total came to about $84 million 3. The report of that day put the open question bluntly: how successful can a company be "when it doesn't control its basic software code and similar products are available for free?" 3 IBM answered it with money, backing Linux in the late 1990s with patent pledges and a $1 billion investment of technical and other resources and helping to establish the Linux Foundation in 2000 4. On July 9, 2019, IBM closed its purchase of Red Hat for $34 billion 5.

Decision mirror: When a free version of a layer appears, the repricing moves fast and lands on whoever owns the layer above it. On January 27, 2025, DeepSeek released a free AI assistant that it said cost less than $6 million to train and whose newer R1 model was 20 to 50 times cheaper to use than OpenAI's o1. Nvidia fell just under 17 percent that day and shed $593 billion of market value, a record one-day loss for any company on Wall Street 6.

Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on September 17, 2013. The next day Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar's parent, reported first-day sell-through of more than $800 million worldwide, excluding Japan and Brazil, the highest first day in the history of the company and of the series; more than 8,300 stores in North America alone opened at midnight for it 7.

The launch day was the smaller half of the transaction on offer. Every copy included access to Grand Theft Auto Online, a separate open-world game that opened on October 1, 2013, two weeks later 7.

Within a year the service had become the business. Take-Two's annual report for the year ended March 31, 2014 recorded that the title had reached $1 billion in retail sales faster than any entertainment release in history, had sold in more than 33 million units, and that more than 70 percent of players who connected to the internet had played Grand Theft Auto Online, which was the single largest contributor to the company's digitally delivered revenue that year; nearly half of that digital revenue came from recurrent consumer spending on virtual currency, add-on content and online games 8.

Twelve years on, the same title is still carrying the profit and loss. In its annual report letter for the year ended March 31, 2026, Take-Two said the Grand Theft Auto series had continued to outpace expectations and that sales of Grand Theft Auto V had advanced further, with nearly 230 million units sold in to date 9. In the quarter ended December 31, 2025, Grand Theft Auto Online and Grand Theft Auto V were the largest contributors to net bookings, and recurrent consumer spending accounted for 76 percent of net bookings and 77 percent of GAAP net revenue 10. Take-Two is projecting record net bookings in fiscal 2027 on the back of Grand Theft Auto VI, dated November 19, 2026 10.

Decision mirror: A launch without a service behind it leaves nothing to renew. Sony released the team shooter Concord on August 23, 2024 and took it offline on September 6, 2024, refunding every buyer; the game had spent eight years in development at an estimated cost above $100 million, and the analysts at GameDiscoverCo estimated fewer than 25,000 copies sold 11.

Professional football in 1920 had three problems its owners agreed on: salaries were climbing, players kept jumping to whichever club bid highest, and college players with eligibility left were being used. A league in which every member followed the same rules was the proposed answer. On August 20, 1920, representatives of the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, Cleveland Indians and Dayton Triangles met at the Jordan and Hupmobile auto showroom in Canton, Ohio, and formed the American Professional Football Conference 12.

The second meeting, on September 17, 1920, again in Canton, brought in clubs from four states: Akron, Canton, Cleveland and Dayton from Ohio; Hammond and Muncie from Indiana; Rochester from New York; and Rock Island, the Decatur Staleys and the Racine Cardinals from Illinois. The owners changed the league's name to the American Professional Football Association and elected Jim Thorpe, the best-known player in the sport, as its president 12.

The terms of membership were nominal in both senses. Each team was charged a $100 fee to give the new league an appearance of respectability, and no team ever paid it; scheduling was left to the clubs themselves, so the number of games played varied widely from club to club 12. The first game involving an association team was played on September 26, 1920, at Rock Island's Douglas Park, where 800 spectators watched the Independents beat the St. Paul Ideals 48-0, and the first transfer of a player between clubs came that season, when Akron sold tackle Bob Nash to Buffalo for $300 and five percent of the gate receipts 12.

The structure that made all of it worth something was built afterwards. In 1921 the association reorganised under Joe Carr of the Columbus Panhandles, drafted a constitution and by-laws, granted clubs territorial rights, restricted player movement and issued standings for the first time. On June 24, 1922, the American Professional Football Association renamed itself the National Football League 12.

A century later the collective, rather than any club, holds the money. The league pools its national revenue and distributes it equally, and in the most recent fiscal year each of the 32 clubs received $432.6 million, more than $13.8 billion in total, disclosed through the Green Bay Packers, the only publicly owned club, which says that national revenue is about 60 percent of its total 13. The media agreements signed in March 2021 with CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN and Amazon run for 11 years to 2033 and are together worth more than $100 billion, with Amazon paying about $1 billion a year for exclusive Thursday night games 14. Entry to the structure now costs real money: in July 2023 NFL owners approved the sale of the Washington Commanders for $6.05 billion, a record for a North American sports franchise, against the $800 million Dan Snyder paid for the same club in 1999 15.

Decision mirror: The same pooled-rights structure is now being repriced by streaming platforms. On July 24, 2024, the NBA announced 11-year agreements with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon covering the 2025-26 through 2035-36 seasons, with about 75 regular-season games moving onto broadcast television each season against a minimum of 15 under the previous contracts 16.

Four questions to run against a launch of your own this week: