Linus's Baby Comes of Age

just_another_sean writes "Torvalds' Baby Comes of Age - BusinessWeek Online is running a story on how Linux has matured over the years. They have some positive things to say about it, and back up their statements with some examples and stats." From the article: "Hardware companies are selling more than $1 billion in servers to run Linux every quarter, while sales of servers running proprietary software continue to fall. And now, slowly but surely, Linux is making inroads on the desktop as well. According to IBM, 10 million desktops ran Linux in 2004 -- a 40% jump from a year ago. That progress has been an important foot in the door for all open-source companies. Marc Fleury, chief executive of open-source middleware company JBoss, describes the Linux operating system pioneered by Torvalds as the older brother who fought the tough battles and was able to get the curfew extended and the keys to the car, so that life was a lot easier for the rest of the open-source world. "

Comments

even though it's GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

So is the GPL really such a handicap?

Linux maturity and business opportunities

[totallygeek]

IBM's adoption of Linux and push of advertising has done wonders for overall acceptance of Linux by the business communities I work with. This is especially true of regulated industries, such as financial, medical, and educational. It is nice to see the very small project grow to become such an animal, while maintaining the ability to steer clear of bad commercialism. There have been many players that could have chosen to not further develop in Linux and it would have just remained a 'geek-only' system that people downloaded and wrangled with installing just to say they could do it.

so all its all thanks to the kernel?

[gullevek]

I doubt that, a kernel allone doesn't make a server. I'd say its thanks to apache group (apache, tomcat, ...), php, samba and all the other services that you can provide and that can replace properitary services.
Same for the desktop. It's thanks to KDE/Gnome that it gets more and more accepted on the desktop. The kernel is just one small part ...
But well, manager & business journalist. Lets keep it simple and add a pie graphic!

Re:so all its all thanks to the kernel?

[i_should_be_working]

I'd rather have to replace the kernel (by doing something like switch to BSD) than replace all the GNU software I use.

Re:so all its all thanks to the kernel?

[rolfwind]

It's not ALL thanks to the kernel but the kernel helped get everything else gel. It's was the right piece of software at the right time.

Back in the early 90's the GNU had all these cool tools but still no functional kernel (up to 2004, IIRC???) - enter Linux. And the rest would be history.

Without Linux, a lot of other opensource projects might not have gotten started or would be residing largely on Windows or BSD. On Windows, open source would be okay until MS decides it's time to get into that market........ so that's unstable ground to say the least. BSD - well, I have nothing against it - but I wonder if it would have achieved Linux's sucess (if Linux were missing from the picture) due to differences in licenses and the seemingly more closed organization around developing the kernel.

Actually it's Stallman's baby

[hansreiser]

Sorry, but Stallman of www.fsf.org was the one, and Linus made an important contribution (the kernel was only one of many pieces needed by the OS), but not as important as those made by the guy who failed to name anything after himself.

First we needed an editor (emacs), then a compiler (gcc), a bunch of utilities (things like cp got written by the fsf), a license (the GPL), and only after all that Stallman originated stuff was in place were we ready for a kernel.

Hans

Flame on :)

[Henk Postma]

At the risk of starting a "is it GNU/Linux" flamewar ...

Opensource is hardly Linus' baby, more like RMS. Not discounting Linus: it was of course smart of him to use the opensource concept, and he can surely code me into a corner.

Plus, don't forget: the kernel is not the (only) thing that makes linux great, it's all the tools Apache/Perl/gnome/kde etc that live on top of it.

Re:Still not where i want it..

[temojen]

Hint: PostgreSQL. If you play with proprietary vendors, you get proprietary vendor games.

older sibling ...

[Triumph The Insult C]

curfew extended and the keys to the car,

that's the easy part. getting laid^H^H^H^Haccepted by PHBs as being suitable 'enterprise grade' computing is the hard part

Re:What distro does Linus run?

[CastrTroy]

If people are really going to choose 1 distro over the other, because Linus uses it, then they are pretty dumb users. You really have to choose your distro based on what you will be using it for. There is no distro that's right for everyone. That's where windows has it wrong. They try to create 1 windows that's right for everyone, and instead, don't really end up satisfying anyone. Never mind the Home,Pro,Server,Advanced Server, DC Server versions. They are all really the same OS, with a few features disabled. With linux, you can get any version, and enable all the features. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars just because you happen to have a 16 cpu machine.