By Egan Orion
Thu Aug 25 2011, 00:09
ONE MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT, a student at the University of Helsinki posted a query to the newsgroup comp.os.minix asking, "What would you like to see most in minix?" The student's name was Linus Torvalds, and that Usenet post was the beginning of the Linux operating system (OS). The date was 25 August 1991, exactly 20 years ago today.
In 1991 Unix had existed for about 20 years since the early 1970s, Apple had come out with its Mac OS in 1984, and Microsoft had been flogging Windows since 1985. Torvalds' ambitions for his "new (free) operating system" were modest. It was to be "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" for IBM PC "386(486) AT clones". He wanted to call his OS kernel "Freax", but a friend who ran the FTP server that hosted the software named Torvalds' source code download directory "linux" and the name stuck.
Though at first developed under Minix, Linux soon came to be built using the free GNU software development toolchain, compiler, bash command shell and userspace commands and utilities that Richard Stallman began developing in 1984. For that reason Stallman and the Free Software Foundation prefer to call it GNU/Linux, and they have a point, but most people just call it Linux. It is licensed as free software under the GNU General Public Licence, version 2 (GPLv2) and Linus Torvalds holds the trademark on Linux.
As a free, Unix-like OS that mostly adheres to the POSIX, SUS, ISO and ANSI standards and is built using free and open source software that is based on copyleft principles, Linux quickly gained software developer interest and developed rapidly into a fully fledged OS supporting a robust software development ecosystem and thousands of software applications.
By now, 20 years later, Linux includes source code contributed over the years by thousands of software developers from all around the world. Torvalds' adoption of copyleft principles has been crucial to Linux success.
Based upon authors' legal rights under international copyright law, copyleft works a lot like the old parable of Stone Soup - everyone contributes a little bit, all share in the results, and everyone benefits.
Suit-wearing business people are more comfortable using the phrase 'Open Source' than 'Free Software', and prefer to talk about the 'Open Source Method' rather than 'Copyleft', but fundamentally these are just the same things under different names. Whatever you call this, copyleft development or the open source method, it is the factor that has driven the extemely rapid development and astonishingly pervasive adoption of Linux over the past 20 years.
Linux was the first prominent software success of the open source method, though many other software development projects have since adopted it, most notably the other major components of the LAMP stack that now runs most of the world wide web.
Open source is recognised as perhaps the most powerful, although at times chaotic, way to harness the creative energies of a critical mass of software developers, and its use has been extended to crowd-sourcing projects in science, knowledge acquisition, businesses, legal research and analysis, and others. Demonstrating the power of open source methods might be the most important contribution that Linux development has made to the world.
In the 1990s, Linux was usually dismissed by scornful proprietary OS partisans as merely a 'hobbyist operating system', though as years went by there came to be more than a hint of desperate 'whistling past the graveyard' in their derision.
There were relatively few Linux distributions available at first, the chief ones being Slackware, Debian, Red Hat and Suse, and a few derivatives of those.
Especially in the early 1990s, installing Linux could be a bit difficult and time-consuming for casual Windows PC users who weren't familiar with Unix systems. There was a joke during that era that if Linux were an airplane, the passengers would be handed a pile of parts and expected to build the aircraft before they could fly in it. That was rather funny at the time because it was somewhat apt.
However, as Linux distributions matured so also did their installation scripts, software repositories and update processes. Graphical desktop shells such as KDE and Gnome were built, and GUI-based system configuration and control toolsets and software applications were developed. Stable email clients and web browsers along with serviceable office applications were developed.
Towards the end of the 1990s, installing Linux on a desktop PC alongside or in place of Microsoft Windows became not only feasible but relatively painless for many PC users who were interested to make the effort.
Today, you can download any of several major Linux distributions and install it from CD, DVD or hard disk in as little as a half hour or so. Many leadng Linux distributions offer a live CD that you can try out without having to install it.
Now there are now more than 300 flavours of Linux for every conceivable niche and taste, although only the top dozen or so have achieved what might be considered widespread take-up. Most of the smaller Linux distributions are derivatives of a few major ones, and some have fallen into disuse while others have sprung up, with greater or lesser degrees of success.
One of the more successful ones that stands out is the Debian Linux derivative called Ubuntu, and with its emphasis on ease of installation and use Ubuntu has quickly gained popularity.
Red Hat's Fedora, Opensuse and Mandriva, to name just a few, are also well integrated and more satisfying for experienced Linux users, and server users tend to run Debian or the Red Hat clone Centos, but those are simply matters of taste and everyone has their own particular needs and opinions.
Since about 1999 or so, Linux use has simply exploded. One factor was that IBM invested $1bn in Linux, starting in 1999. In 2001, the annual growth rate of Linux server installations hit 15 per cent. That pace has continued, such that now most servers are running Linux. It's not called a 'hobbyist operating system' anymore.
So, 20 years on, what runs Linux? An easier question to answer might be, what doesn't?
Linux runs on almost everything from wristwatches through music players, smartphones, tablets, TV set-top boxes and DVRs, PC netbooks, notebooks, desktops and servers, huge datacentres at Google, Amazon, Rackspace and almost all smaller hosting providers, on IBM mainframes under VM, all the way up to more than 80 per cent of the world's Top 500 supercomputers, each comprising thousands of processors.
Large financial houses run Linux systems, although they didn't talk about it much 10 years ago because they regarded it as a competitive advantage. But now Wall Street, the City of London and other major financial centres depend on tens of thousands of Linux systems for everything from broker workstations through high-frequency trading systems and back-end analytical number crunching.
The centre for European nuclear research CERN and its massive international network of university reseachers develop and run Scientific Linux.
The US military runs Linux, having worked out that it costs about one-tenth the price of proprietary Unix systems.
Russia, China, India and several other countries and regional governments develop their own Linux distributions.
The only computers today that notably don't run Linux are IBM mainframes running Z OS, Unix servers, mass market Windows desktop and laptop PCs, a rapidly diminishing number of low-end smartphones that run the Symbian OS, and devices made for Apple to run its locked-down proprietary operating systems.
Arguably, Microsoft has only maintained its Windows dominance on consumer PCs by using its market power to pressure the major PC makers, large corporations and even some governments to continue buying Windows and Microsoft Office every few years. But even without regulatory antitrust action, that cannot continue forever.
The Linux derivative Android mobile OS ships on nearly half of all smartphones and is set to take first place in smartphones by 2015, according to industry analysts.
Linux has come a long way in 20 years, and its next 20 years should be just as interesting and successful. Linus Torvald's tongue-in-cheek goal of Linux world domination might not be realised yet, but it has made a lot of progress. ยต
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