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Linus Torvalds Receives IEEE Computer Pioneer Award
mikejuk (1801200) writes "Linus Torvalds, the 'man who invented Linux' is the 2014 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Computer Pioneer Award, '[f]or pioneering development of the Linux kernel using the open-source approach.' According to Wikipedia, Torvalds had wanted to call the kernel he developed Freax (a combination of 'free,' 'freak,' and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server it was first hosted for download, named Torvalds' directory linux. In some ways Git can be seen as his more important contribution — but as it dates from 2005 it is outside the remit of the IEEE Computer Pioneer award."
He is very deserving of the award. Well done.
"Git can be seen as his more important contribution"
Umm no. The early 1990's were dark days. Linux was/is a big deal. Where would we be without Linux? It changed the world! The same can't quite be said about Git (although great in its domain).
Git is a nice tool, but it's not even close to his work on Linux. Orders of magnitude less important. You'd be paying for commercial licenses of Solaris, GNU would have seen far less of an audience and not progressed nearly as fast as it has, and you'd be paying VMware license fees every time you started up an EC2 instance. If Git disappeared tomorrow, I'd switch to svn and probably grumble a couple more times than normal. If Linux disappeared tomorrow, I'd be bankrupt and broke.
This is one hell of a comprehensive troll. Well done sir: you win the keys to your mother's basement.
who is git, and to what is s/he objecting?
No shit. An operating system that changed the world, vs. a versioned source control system that makes certain administrative tasks easier. I feel sad for anyone who doesn't have the sense of history or proportion to put these endeavors in their proper place.
Plus, git was only really the most popular of many darcs copies. We wouldn't really be any further back without it. If anything, further forward, because darcs gets the semantics of a DSCM more right (and doesn't need hacks like rebasing).
Git may not be at the same level of importance as the Linux kernel, but it is still a masterpiece of engineering. It's a total reinvention or at the very least a massive refinement and rethinking of workflow within a version control system. While there are other players. It's difficult to call any of them competition. If there is a major award that pioneering Git falls into, he deserves that as well.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Talk about damning with faint praise.
there _was_ no free operating system for industry standard hardware, much less a Unix-like one, and the commercial offerings were all platform-specific.
If you wanted a real computer that could do real stuff (as opposed to a DOS box, which wasn't even network aware in any substantive way, and even in non-substantive ways required $$$ for bare-bones, single-function software tools that were cobbled together out of batch files and nonsense), you had to:
- Get your hands on dedicated Unix workstation hardware, which was often poorly documented/supported outside of a corporate sales account
- This meant either $tens of thousands for current workstation hardware or $thousands for last-cycle hardware if it was even available at all (university and government surplus lots were the primary suspects)
- Phone up the one or two providers that offered OSes for the system
- Shell out $many thousands for a license (and often $thousands more for media)
- In many cases, because non-current hardware was tied to non-current OSes no longer for sale, port the current tree yourself to the non-current hardware after spending the $thousands you spent for a license
In short, it was substantively impossible for—say—a small company, a startup, or a CS/CE student to get their hands on anything beyond a DOS box with Windows 3 on it. With money and time, they MIGHT get web BROWSING working on Windows 3—in unstable ways. Developing software was a nightmare on these DOS/Win3 boxes as well—compilers were expensive, proprietary, and often required runtimes that had to be licensed on a per-user basis (i.e. you spent $200 on the compiler that spoke a non-standard dialect, then if you wanted to sell what you created, you spent another $some amount per copy sold) and that had no hooks for anything network-ish, because there were no standards in the DOS ecosystem for that.
Linux changed everything. Suddenly, you could pick up commodity i386 hardware and actually do network stuff with it in Unix-y ways. Even in the early days when Linux was unstable, incomplete, and a bear to install/configure, it made things possible for small shops or independent developers/creators that had simply been prohibitive in every practical way just a year earlier.
As a result, the Unix networking ways—thanks in many ways directly to Linux—would eventually become the industry standard form of networking (TCP/IP over ethernet) that we take for granted today—but in no way was history certain to end up this way. We could just have well been tossing the equivalent of glorified FidoNet payloads today.
Without Linux, GNU, and BSD, it's no stretch to say that we may not have had an Internet today in any way that we'd recognize, and certainly Linux has been the most visible and most widely distributed amongst the three.
Much more than the work by Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds invented the future that we live in.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I can't help feeling that Linux, while extraordinarily powerful, has less relavance now than it did 10 years ago.
Surely you are joking. Not only did it dethrone nearly all UNIXes used for server side tasks, is used in nearly all Top500 supercomputers, but it is ubiquitous on Android mobile platforms as well. If this is not success what is?
The desktop needs to be thought over again.
Linus Torvalds did not "invent" Linux. He implemented a POSIX kernel, working from basic UNIX standards and preexisting hardware (the 80386 MMU). UNIX was an invention. Linux was "just" an implementation. As it grew, there were various inventions going into it. But Linux "as such" was not an invention.
In contrast, Torvalds did basically invent Git. Its shape and functionality, as opposed to what Linux started with, were not predetermined.
Git is really a gift from BitKeeper. If BitKeeper had chosen to not be dicks, everybody would still be using it for Linux kernel development. Hell, BitKeeper doesn't even put pricing information on their web site, you need to 'request' it [but you know it ain't cheap if they say it costs $$$ from a range of zero $ to $$$$].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
In 1996 Linux Torvalds joined Transmeta, a California-based startup that was designing an energy-saving CPU. He continued to oversee kernel development for Linux, and in 2003 left Transmeta to focus exclusively on the Linux kernel as a Fellow at The Linux Foundation (known at the time as Open Source Development Labs) and today remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.
https://drive.google.com/file/...
The man has been renamed after his own Frankenstein.
"Git can be seen as his more important contribution"
Umm no. The early 1990's were dark days. Linux was/is a big deal. Where would we be without Linux?
With i386BSD most likely. The main advantage of Linux as a kernel was that it was only a kernel and so using GNU with it did not leave you with an unsupported system.
You're confusing the Linux kernel with a Linux distro. Linus got the award for his work on the kernel. Up to cca year 2000, the crushing dominance of DOS over Linux as a kernel in the desktop world cannot be explained by any technical merits of the former vs. the later. Even with the advent of XP and the "NT" kernel, there's still no technical reason why the "NT" kernel would technically be more adept to desktop use. If you want a good explanation on why Windows is the no 1 desktop system, the kernel is definitely not the place to look for answers.
just far less visibility.
The Internet runs on Linux. The number of routers, firewalls/filters, and networking devices and network-connected appliances of all kinds that are Linux-based is staggering. Android is Linux. Every major commercial operating system has either learned/copped or borrowed code from Linux. The supercomputing world is totally pwned by Linux in every way. The practical work of virtually all of science these days relies on Linux.
Linux is freaking HUGE for our world.
On the desktop, however, Linux has been neglected, because designing consumer UX is a very different skill from the skillset that most of the OSS developer world brings to bear. It's too bad—when KDE 1.0 was released, it was obvious to anyone looking that Linux was the future of desktop computing—and yet in many ways the Linux desktop is worse than it has ever been from a consumer usability standpoint.
But don't mistake "not visible on desktops at home or at work" from "not relevant."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
than the desktop computing userlands you're thinking of. (With apologies to Shakespeare.)
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Not to mention that hadn't Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, we would still be waiting for the Hurd to take off. One could argue that Linux is binding resources (volunteer coders) that could be otherwise engaged into developing the Hurd had Linux not existed, but I simply doubt that developers would follow Stallman the way they follow Torvalds.
I wsa a fan of Darcs. I used it a fair bit, but it was just a little bit flakey. Sometimes it would eat all memory and crash, occasionally leaveing the old history corrupted.
I love the theory of patches and the excellent cherry picking and the way it works with bisection. But, day to day I prefer git.
Mercurial is fine too, I think, but I haven't used it enough to make a solid judgement call.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
We should not diminish the importance of Linux. But it's clear that Git is much more important today. Linux is wonderful, but its a commodity for most people. It doesn't matter that Android is based on Linux. It's awesome but most people don't care. It's just a technicality.
It's "just a technicality" in the sense that Android might not exist if Linux hadn't existed; saying that it's less relevant because people don't know it's there is like saying that ARM isn't all that important because most people don't know they have ARM processors in their smartphones. Git is even less directly relevant to most people, as they're not developers.
What Linus did by creating GitHub is of tremendously much more importance if you look at how well it brings open source developers together.
Presumably you meant "by creating Git"; as far as I know, he no more created GitHub than he created Android, even if GitHub uses Git and Android uses Linux.
Linux was originally released in November of 1991. 386BSD was released in March of 1992.
So where would we be? At the worst about 4 months behind, but probably ahead because 386BSD was substantially more complete when it came out than Linux would be for several years.
No shit. An operating system that changed the world,
...by being the first widely-available, free-as-in-beer-and-speech (and not under legal threat from AT&T) Unix-compatible OS.
vs. a versioned source control system that makes certain administrative tasks easier.
...and that was most definitely not the first widely-available, free-as-in-beer-and-speech version control system capable of over-the-network access (and not, as far as I know, even the first widely-available, free-as-in-beer-and-speech distributed version control system).
(And it makes some things harder if you're "holding it wrong", but I digress.)
...in that most of userland was already available freely for him to use, and BSD's free release was delayed by court cases.
Fortunate, yes, but not "merely" fortunate. Nearly every success story also has a component of being in the right place at the right time, but unless you're talking about lottery winners, there's typically far more "work" than "luck" involved.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I was talking to a friend of mine recently about OpenSSL, and the developers' complaint that they aren't receiving financial or development support from some of the companies that use and benefit most from the software. My point of view is that if you, as a developer, need financial or development support from the users of your software, you need to tell them so. If you don't tell them what support you need in exchange, then you aren't going to get it. The best place for the terms of that agreement is your license. If your license demands nothing in return for your software, very often you will receive nothing for your software. While this is an unpopular opinion, I believe it is their own fault, and not the fault of the users of their software, that they aren't getting the support that they need.
I think it's easy to make the argument that Linux is more significant than GNU. Android is a Linux operating system, without GNU. DD-WRT and similar systems are Linux, without GNU. However, I personally think that Linux is less significant than the GPL. The license gave us a means to collaborate, to create open systems, and to get the support that we need for the software that we develop.
Not to mention that hadn't Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, we would still be waiting for the Hurd to take off. One could argue that Linux is binding resources (volunteer coders) that could be otherwise engaged into developing the Hurd had Linux not existed, but I simply doubt that developers would follow Stallman the way they follow Torvalds.
Alternative history is always a wild guess, but it's unlikely nothing would have happened for 20+ years. Maybe one of the BSDs, maybe an EGCS-style fork from HURD or an entirely different project would have filled some of the void. I doubt any of them could have taken it quite as far as Linus has though, with Android I assume Linux is the world's most popular OS kernel by number of devices.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"In some ways Git can be seen as his more important contribution" - thus spake someone who was not there in the early 90's, and who takes free software and OS competition for granted. In other words, someone who is naive beyond words.
The change brought by Git is insignificant next to that brought by Linux. Utterly insignificant.
Not to mention that hadn't Torvalds developed the Linux kernel, we would still be waiting for the Hurd to take off.
We're not still waiting for the Hurd to take off?
Ezekiel 23:20
I really don't get Git. I've looked at it a few times, and it seems much less intuitive to me than Subversion was when I learned it. I could see it being good for really, really large projects, like Linux, but non-distributed version control systems seem so much simpler I can't help but think they're better choices than Git for most projects. Maybe someone could specify, for a project with =20 people on it, what's so great about Git?
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
In a sense, you are correct. I am referring to more than the kernel when I say 'Linux'. Acknowledged, there is wide disagreement about that.
I'm referring to 'Linux' as the core of an alternative to the Mac OS/OS X/DOS/Windows 9.x/Windows NT/BeOS systems that have locked the vast majority of computer users in to a licensed platform for most of personal computing history. It's not happening, and that saddens me.
I've been around Linux a long time. It's powerful. It's alternately the only way to accomplish some tasks, and maddeningly broken in others (even ignoring sound and xconfig). The OOM killer's tendency to kill exactly the process you DO NOT WANT KILLED has been an issue for more years than I can count. Maybe it's better now (and yes, I know it is tunable), or maybe we all just have more memory.
At any rate, Linux has succeeded marvelously as the hobby it once was, and I'm glad it's around underneath Android, Microtik, Vyatta, etc. It's a good server platform, although no longer head-and-shoulders over Windows Server as is used to be. What it isn't is meaningful for most users most of the time.
I'll bite :-)
I used csv and subversion back in the day, switched to hg, and now switched to git. I manage a smallish project with 5 or so contributors and contribute to some other projects.
Git/hg vs csv/svn is all about distributed vs centralized. With git/hg, you learn to love branching and merging, and commit as often as needed.
Git vs hg is more subtle, but I am strongly in the git camp now.
In my perception, hg et al are about lines of code. You contribute code and the code is checked in. git is all about commits. Your work is in commits, and commits can be rebased, squashed, amended, etc until they are just right to express your contribution. Git is not so much about communicating with yourself about how you got to your code; git is about communicating to the rest of the team what you are contributing. In a sense, you are not (just) writing code, you are writing a commit history.
That said, what I miss in git is the "version history" of commits. I would like to see some sort of "is-based-on" link between the 'final' commit and the commits it is amended, rebased, and/or squashed from. I would love to be able to 'expand' a final commit to see the history that went into it, because now you are sometimes choosing between commit elegance and keeping track of development history (aka in the choice to amend a silly type you choose elegance; in the choice to -no-ff merge a branch you choose history).
Sorry, I was short of karma, and this place is full of Microsoft shills nowadays.
Stick Men
I love everything that linus has contributed to the FOSS community and I feel like he would be beloved by all if he weren't so smug about his thoughts always being the best.
If BitKeeper had chosen to not be dicks
I see you haven't met Larry McVoy.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
We should not diminish the importance of Linux. But it's clear that Git is much more important today.
Bullshit. If Git vanished overnight, we'd at least have Mercurial. There is no such drop-in replacement for Linux. (I'm not digging on FreeBSD/OpenSolaris/etc, but Linux completely dominates them in real-world deployments.)
Also, Linux was a much more disruptive development. A real working kernel for a real working Unix-like OS, that's free and open source, was/is a huge deal. Git is awesome, but there's no question that Torvalds' work on Linux is more award-worthy.
Lastly, in terms of sheer scale/ambitiousness, Linux absolutely dwarfs Git. A "poor man's git" could be thrown together with Bash scripts without too much pain (indeed, this is how Git has been developed). There is no such analog for GNU/Linux. Even at the conceptual level, there's a huge amount going on.
In their proper place, you say?
git rebase -i
Thank me later.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm not holding my breath...
You're not alone. Git is great, but has a terrible interface. I know many respectable and intelligent software engineers who find the interface difficult. It goes beyond RTFM. OTOH, SVN has an amazing interface. Very well thought out. I think SVN would be just as great as git if not better if it added in some of Git's features.
What's cool about git?
In conclusion, Git is great, but you're not crazy for finding the interface insurmountable.
I'm not going to say the kids need to leave the lawn, but saying Git can be seen in any way as Torvalds' more important contribution is speaking from ignorance. The people who say there were other OSes that could've filled the same role, but then list off prices for each, are ignorant too.
Linux was free and freely available.
I went from installing it out of the back of a book and from some odd company named Yggdrasil's ftp server, to installing it for a multi-million dollar enterprise fail-over solution.
I went from twiddling values for "drums" to get my hard disks recognized, to it upgrading itself unattended on a phone in my pocket.
Git got to where it was because Torvalds mandated it for Linux contributions. Linux, and the rest of the world, would be fine if Git didn't exist. There were and are plenty of free revision control systems out there. No one can say the same for Linux.
non-distributed version control systems seem so much simpler
I find quite the opposite. The simplest case is one user, and a "distributed" VCS is clearly the easiest option in that case--no central repository needed, no environment variables to set, or separate paths to worry about. Just say "init", and you're off and running. (At least with Mercurial or Git, the two DVCSes I have experience with.)
With more than one user, it's slightly more complicated, but not enough to worry about. It all boils down to the distinction between "save this change" and "share my changes with my co-workers". Having those as separate commands really isn't that confusing, and once you're used to it (which should not take long), you'll have a hard time remembering how you lived without it! And that really is the entire difference, fundamentally, between distributed and non-distributed VCSes.
(Most of the things that are great about Git are unrelated to the distributed/non-distributed aspect, or at best tangential to it. For me, the big wins of either Git or Mercurial over, say, Subversion, are how much better/faster/easier/more powerful branching is, which doesn't really have to do with being distributed or not, and how much faster the whole thing is, overall, without all those network round-trips, which does.)
I started out somewhat skeptical, like you, but after my first pilot project, using Mercurial, I was a complete convert! YMMV but it Works For Me(tm)! :)
what's so great about Git?
Before git, it was possible to fetch a simple source tree! Now, the user is forced to download history if nobody makes a simple tarball available. This is a massive improvement somehow!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Its not a technicality at all. You're thinking marketing not reality.
That's like saying clothing being made of cotton is a technicality and cotton isn't important.
The fact that Linux exists allows for a lot of other things to exist that you wouldn't have otherwise, even though the average person is unaware of it.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
You can tell whether or not someone was actually there by whether or not they mention things like "Minix" in a list of viable operating systems.
I was part of a project at the time that needed real networking and a real Unix development environment. We spent four months working to find an alternative, then shelled out for a series of early Sparc pizza boxes. SS2 boxes maybe? As I recall, we got four at nearly $15k each that ate up a huge chunk of our budget.
Two years later, we had liquidated them and were doing all of the same stuff on Linux with cheap 486 boxes and commodity hardware, and using the GNU userland and toolchain. People here talk about GNU as predating Linux while forgetting that prior to Linux, the only place to run it was on your freaking Sparcstation (or equivalent—but certainly not under Minix), which already came with a vendor-supported userland. GNU starts to be interesting exactly when Linux becomes viable.
All in all, the change was bizarrely cool and amazing. We were like kids in a candy store—computing was suddenly so cheap as to almost be free, rather than the single most expensive non-labor cost in a project.
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> The stash/shelve feature is sorely missing from SVN.
Am I missing something here? I'm not understanding why you couldn't just make a new branch?
Linus deserves recognition for the amount of work he has done; but as an operating system, Linux in my mind has always demonstrated the difference between popularity and quality. I wholeheartedly felt that Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson deserved the awards they received; but where Linus is concerned, I'm more ambivalent.
For me, Linux is popular , while *BSD is actually good. I can't motivate myself to install a Linux distribution, these days, and for two reasons.
a} In technical terms, I know of no distro in existence, which has close to the same level of overall quality as the BSDs. Comparitive Linux distributions are invariably a bloated, disorganised, opaque mess.
b} Linux developers are socially toxic, hubristic, juvenile adolescents; who are persistently unrepentant about the degree to which their code sucks. I would laugh about said developers' near-mindless obsession with modernity and false "innovation" purely for its' own sake, if said attitude did not make me so angry. Massive changes are made to the system, just because . Changes are not made with any real consideration for whether or not said changes are actually a good idea, but rather because any change is apparently seen as somehow being better than none at all. It is a completely irrational attitude.
I probably should not let my level of disgust with the current state of Linux as a whole, cloud my enthusiasm about Linus being recognised for his genuine tenacity and brilliance as a programmer. I've said before that the .01 release of the kernel was absolute poetry; but then, tragically, over the years both the Windows refugees and the cultic, authoritarian Leftist FSF vermin moved in, and the rest became history.
Linus should strongly consider riding off into the proverbial sunset before too long, I feel. Let him go out on a high note, and let history remember him favourably, before the malevolence of the likes of Lennart Poettering contaminates his legacy.
I love git and use it everyday, but I'm not sure I understand 5% of it.
That said, I think https://www.kernel.org/pub/sof... could help you.
git rev-list --all --pretty=oneline
The early 1990's were dark days. Linux was/is a big deal. Where would we be without Linux?
1991, when Linux was released, was indeed the dark days. The i386 port of BSD was delayed by legal uncertainty over the AT&T vs UCB lawsuit. When UCB resoundingly won, 386BSD was released and was a vastly more mature system than Linux. Today, Linux and FreeBSD aren't that different in terms of performance or support. Debian kFreeBSD works quite happily with a glibc ported to FreeBSD and runs most of the same applications as Debian Linux. Linux still lacks some things (kernel sound mixing, ZFS, DTrace, Capsicum, jails, and so on) that FreeBSD has had for a long time and there are things on the other side that Linux has that FreeBSD lacks, but by and large they're pretty comparable.
If we hadn't had Linux, we'd most likely be using a BSD derivative now. On the other hand, if Linux hadn't taken the momentum away from HURD, maybe some of the microkernel operating systems would have seen a lot more attention and we'd now not be in a world where you have 5-10MB of object code compiled from a language with no memory safety running in ring 0...
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Modded "Troll" for pointing out a couple facts? Never change, Slashdot.
I guess that's a reasonable response. It fits in with the notion that SVN stores much more information in the actual repository. In practice, there are a few issues, however.
In a controlled (read: corporate) environment, the architect or lead or integration person may feel ownership over the repository, and, therefore, resist the excess creation of personal branches. In any environment, it can create a lot of clutter in the repo which leads to cognitive noise. Branches will be merged back in, potentially leaving a messier looking history. With the stash/shelve feature, when the code is finally committed, it ends up looking more like a linear development line. This, again, reduces cognitive noise.
I think having special "stash branches" in an SVN-like repo is an intriguing idea.
IMHO, his major contribution was the use of email and the NNTP newsgroup to organize and delegate tasks to open source programmers around the world. Linux is the product of many hands, and Torvalds should get the credit for building a framework that allows these hands to contribute in an organized way to a final product which is greater than the sum of its parts.
Linux, evan early in its life, was head and shoulders above the other commonly available OS for the Intel platform (DOS). Its competitors were Xenix (from Microsoft) and SCO's Unix. Both were hugely expensive and not necessarily better or more reliable than Linux (they also seemed mired in corporate molasses as far as new features were concerned). I remember installing early versions of Linux from floppy images downloaded from FTP servers. Not only did it work, but it was fast and more stable than Windows 3.1. Its only drawback was the lack of an office suite. There was no word processor and no spreadsheet to compete with Word and Excel. Linus's stated goal was a Unix clone that would run on a PC, to be used by hackers and students. By using the "power of the internet" to identify and organize like minded developers, he succeeded. *That* is in my opinion, his true accomplishment.
Guy I have to tell you I think the legal threat is a BS excuse the BSD people have been pushing for a generation. The difference was one of attitude towards new users and recruitment. The BSD people never even aimed for the average Windows poweruser to be able to switch over.
"Supported platforms: KDE was primarily developed under the GNU/Linux variant of the Unix operating system. However it is known to compile without, or with very few, problems on most Unix variants. At the moment we explicitely support GNU/Linux (Intel , Alpha, Sparc) and Solaris (Sparc) and we have success reports for..."
There are a lot of people here that clearly weren't deeply involved either in serious (non-home) computing or Linux during the era in which Linux was introduced and had its biggest impact.
Lots of "but GNU..." or "but all of these things aren't Linux-only..."
This commentary on KDE is an example. Sure, it eventually supported more platforms. But that doesn't change the fact that as an early OSS project, it was possible—that is to say, the developers that became involved were able to become involved in the first place—only because Linux had become available and broadly accessible.
Without Linux—if people wanting to do GUI development had been limited to DOS/Win3 or Mac OS on the low end, or SunOS/AIX/HPUX/etc. on the high end, in other words—KDE would simply not have happened. First, all of these systems came with their own DE that was vendor-supported and "good enough" while Linux users were stuck with TWM/FVWM or commercial CDE ports, and next, GUI development was either prohibitively complex and specialized or prohibitively expensive on these other platforms.
Saying that the developers at the start used whatever free OS they could find does not change the fact that the free OS that they did, in fact, find was Linux and that's how many of them came into the flow. *BSD had been around for a very long time prior to Linux, yet the Unix world had remained the rarefied and very expensive Unix world with very little of note going on in the middleware level—it was all vendors building systems and departments (academic or enterprise) implementing specific application flows. It was highly vertical and highly proprietary.
Linux enters the scene and in half a decade we have multiple entirely new integrated DEs for Unices, rapidly expanding driver support for almost all commodity hardware, and businesses and schools in every direction running Unix instead of DOS/MacOS. The barriers to entry in computing, information systems, and research design and development of all kinds went from extremely high to almost none, almost overnight—in one cohort of college students, essentially.
Linux opened Unix and networking up and turned them into the global ecosystems that they are today. Saying that this would have been *technically* possible without Linux is not at all good support for the claim that it would have been *likely* at the social (i.e. in actual society) level. Linux changed the game entirely, brought TCP/IP, OSS, and what was once called "high performance computing" (now it's just basic "computing" to raytrace a widget, compress a data stream, or manage multi-gigabyte database) to the public. Before Linux, all of these were exotic and expensive and economies of scale not only didn't apply but in fact couldn't. Now, decades after Linux, they clearly seem very pedestrian to many and economies of scale mean that you can carry them around in your pocket.
It's an eye-opener to read this Slashdot discussion and see so many that don't actually understand or know this.
It makes me think that the time may be ripe for a historical work or historical wiki on Linux/OSS history and its relationship to the broader Internet and information society of the present.
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