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Well it was in this month of October in 1991, 5th to be specific, that a remarkable entrepreneur known only as Linus Benedict Torvalds, published the comp.os.minix letter to a community of developers and users. Known only as the source of the revolutionary movement of the most famous Open sourced operating system in the world; famous only as LINUX.
An operating system thus defined by it’s remarkable integration of ideas by millions of users, system administrators, and a flock of corporate supporters such as SUN, IBM, HP…
The academia and government institutions had long since supported open source software projects as well as the Unix open systems movement, it is Linux - first and foremost - that made open source a commercial idea and one that corporations could embrace, and it can be said that the adaptation for LINUX at the server side was adapted by administrators due to it’s core functionalities coming from different brains.
During these years from the old hardware where the storage and memory sizes were KB’s and MB’s to today where the sizes are counted in GB’s and TB’s, the adaption was fast that of Linux due to its open architecture and at the same time in 1994 windows coming out majorly as a large scale user operating system. This is where the moment in history took its turn fro two of the most core communities in the tech industry.
LINUX being a testament to the powerful idea of a cross platform, open source operating system what Unix should have been and wasn’t, from a motivation to action to motivation of the largest movement of change in the tech industry.
Linux is what Windows had once promised to be - at least in terms of cross-platform support. In the wake of the PowerPC alliance from IBM, Apple, and Motorola in 1991, Microsoft made a commitment to support Windows NT 3.51 on PowerPC chips. Windows eventually added support for Digital’s Alpha NEC’s and SGI’s MIPS chips. Workstation maker Intergraph ported Windows NT 3.51 to its Clipper chips and said it was creating a port to Sparc chips from Sun. Neither ports saw the light of day.
Windows NT 4.0, which came out in 1996, only supported nothing more than f32-bit x86, Alpha, and MIPS chips, and by the turn of the millennium, only x86 chips were supported. (Interestingly, the PowerPC alliance also lined up IBM’s OS/2 and AIX Unixes - the OS/2 was never delivered - and even Sun Microsystems’ SunOS Unix was slated for the PowerPC chips. IBM also ported its OS/400 minicomputer operating system to the 64-bit variants of PowerPC).
Source: Theregister
On the other hand Microsoft got it’s support from big vendors such as IBM, HP , Intel for its OS Windows. Creating an easy to us interactive interface based on DOS using iconic support which was it’s path way to success.
If only that linux would have been in those early years, which are still regarded as the pioneering years of the present computing era, in the world of academia, the world might have been not more of Bill Gates OS but with tough competition and support of open source market OS’s.
This is what we get today of Linux and its flavors from many different vendors who modify the base Linux code fro introducing new features and functionalities. These being RedHat, UBUNTU, NOVELL etc.Along with that it’s GNOME and KDE flavored Desktop environments that evolved in the later years. But the thing that could have made Linux much more adaptable was the central support system if it would have been created back then, would have been useful to it’s more market share today.
One thing remains that the architecture of Linux was expandable and was not constant with so much of breadth of support and community of developers.
In less that two decades, Linux has indeed become a de facto standard for servers, and SMP’s and the mostly used OS in supercomputers that being said that the first Windows based super computer only coming out this year.
But due to too much diversity in LINUX itself and windows as well, in the past decade, Linux adoption was hampered by technical and support issues.Being one of the core downfalls of Linux.
But we could see a trend growing due to the increasing number of issues faced by enterprises due to windows, that investment is coming to evolve LINUX to a much larger scale, that being a report of HP developing its own OS, and UBUNTU, KUBUNTU, and EDUBUNTU, coming out as a “LINUX FOR HUMAN BEINGS” delivered to homes all over the world without any cost, with the backing funds from parent company CANONICAL.
You can order your own desktop or server editions copies from here.
I believe that LINUX is a wonderful OS, which I love but the problem being of the applications that could run on it. Now that applications such as OpenOffice and FireFox have been largely adopted, the revolution is starting again for a larger scale of adaption. A good indication that Microsoft has to support the Open Source revolution, that its .net framework being available in direct replication on Linux via Project Mono.
What do you say, is LINUX going to overthrow or at least gain more market share soon in the future, what is it’s future? What can be done further to improvise in today’s web2.0 and cloud computing era?
