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Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded?
jones_supa writes: "One of the most puzzling questions about the history of free and open source software is this: Why did Linux succeed so spectacularly, whereas similar attempts to build a free or open source, Unix-like operating system kernel met with considerably less success?" Christopher Tozzi has rounded up some theories, focusing specifically on kernels, not complete operating systems. These theories take a detailed look at the decentralized development structure, pragmatic approach to things, and the rich developer community, all of which worked in favor of Linux.
Amazed that neither the GPL nor the legal uncertainties surrounding BSD at the time (hey, remember those days!) were really focused on, but meh. I think like everything else that became wildly popular in spite of plenty of seemingly equivalent or better alternatives, it just came down to dumb luck and momentum.
Somehow Linux got the ball rolling, people gathered around it, it gained steam, and here we are.
FTFY
| wonder what finally made the c-levels unafraid of linux?
time and nobody important being sued
When I was a kid, i read a book called Stone Soup. It was about these guys that wanted to eat, had nothing but a pot. They put in some stones... called it stone soup.
Eventually people got curious, and added things.. the soup became real. Going from water and rocks, to where real ingredients went in, and the stones just fell away. A seed, but then dropped when something real came.
I always thought of Linus as a guy who managed the Stone Soup well. It wasn't specially good in .01 version. But he made people want to add to it. The GPL helped some. Linus chose that license, not as a "hey Im a zealot and you need to give me everything you write" but he thought "if people do cool things they need to let me see their cool things"
That, and FreeBSD had a few handicaps. The biggest one was the AT&T lawsuit. Linus himself once said he'd probably not have bothered with Linux if BSD was clean. The second, BSD had a slower model of improvement. You needed to have the commit bit to do anything constructive. Meanwhile Linus (later Cox) took code from pretty much anyone that made sense. Third, BSD5 had a radical new kernel design that added a lot of complication for threading with little gain. DragonFlyBSD was forked because of this.
So, IMHO, there were a few things... all of them dented (Free)BSD, and there really wasn't another competitor out there.
Linux is not a copy of Minix, the code is quite different.
It's not a big mystery. Linus released a primitive kernel that worked, at the right time, with the right license, and then diligently kept rolling up contributions and releasing the result.
Expanding a bit:
While the first release of Linux was primitive, it worked. People hungry for a free *NIX were able to grab it and run it. At the same time, HURD was a big research project; if you just wanted to run *NIX on your own computer, HURD was not at all ready.
Linus released it at the right time. It was just becoming possible for large numbers of people to get the kernel from him, and to send contributions back to him. Something like Linux might not have worked at all before the Internet and/or BBSs; it would have been too difficult to send releases out and collect contributions of code.
Linus used the right license. He has said that the choice of releasing under GPLv2 was the best decision he ever made. Arguably a BSD license could have worked as well, but many people have a fear that if they contribute to BSD projects, that evil companies might benefit from their work; with GPL they are comfortable contributing. Also, IBM contributed some code that uses IBM patents; because of the GPL, IBM knew that commercial entities wanting to use the patents would still need to license the patents from IBM. So Linux got the largest possible pool of contributors.
And then there is the fact that Linus worked hard managing Linux. He collected patches sent by people and rolled them in. These days he writes very little code himself; almost all he does is manage patches. I'm not sure how much code he wrote in the early days, but I think his diligent application of patches sent to him helped Linux to become stable and useful.
Given all of the above, Linux was a success, and success bred more success (the "Snowball effect"). People who just wanted something that worked could grab Linux as it worked better and better all the time; people who wanted to join an active project joined it as it was the most active project.
If Linus hadn't released when he did, another project might have gotten the snowball momentum thing going and become the big popular project. But he did, and he worked hard to keep it going, and the result is the kernel that changed the world.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Not sure I see your point. While the phrasing is perhaps a bit uncommon, there's nothing grammatically wrong with the headline.
cut them some slack. they're just doing the needful!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
While working at Intel, we had a large Linux conference with Linus and a few other noteworthy OSS dudes. Afterwards, while we were all millng around, I found myself next to Linus Himself and asked this very question. My belief was that it was the GPL vs BSD license which forced all changes to at least be available for inclusion in the next version. Linux felt that it was more of a timing thing where Linux just kind of hit at the right time. Who really knows?
I had been trying to afford a Unix installation at home as a CS student. All I knew was the Unix vendors. I was not aware of the social structure of the Unix world, various distributions, etc. I was crawling university surplus lots and calling Sun and DEC on the phone to try to find a complete package that I could afford (hardware + license and media). Nothing was affordable.
I was also a heavy BBS and UUCP user at the time over a dial-up line. One day, I found an upload from someone described as "free Unix." It was Linux.
I downloaded it, installed it on the 80386 hardware I was already using, and the rest is history. This was 1993.
So in my case at least, Linux became the OS of choice becuase it had traveled in ways that the other free Unices didn't. It was simply available somewhere where I was.
This isn't an explanation for why Linux ended up there instead of some other free *nix, of course, but by way of explaining the social diffusion of the actual files, I saw Linux distros as floppy disks around on BBSs and newsgroups for several years, with no hint of the others.
For someone with limited network access (by today's standards), this meant that Linux was the obvious choice.
As to why Linux was there and not the others—perhaps packaging and ease of installation had something to do with it? Without much effort, I recognized that the disks were floppy images and wrote out a floppy set. Booted from the first one, and followed my nose. There was no documentation required, and it Just Worked, at least as much as any bare-bones, home-grown CLI *nix clone could be said to Just Work.
I had supported hardware, as it turned out, but then Linux did tend to support the most common commodity hardware at the time.
My hunch is that Linux succeeded because it happened to have the right drivers (developed for what people had in their home PCs, rather than what a university lab might happen to have), and the right packaging (an end-user-oriented install that made it a simple, step-by-step, floppy-by-floppy process to get it up) while the other free *nix systems were less able to go from nothing to system without help and without additional hardware for most home and tiny lab users.
For comparison, I tried Minix around the same time (I can't remember if it was before or after) and struggled mightily just to get it installed, before questions of its capabilities were even at issue. I remember my first Linux install having taken an hour or two, and I was able to get X up and running the same day. It took me much longer to get the disks downloaded and written. Minix, by comparison, took about a week of evenings, and at the end, I was disappointed with the result.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It was because Linux more or less worked, and people could use it and add to it because of the GPL. The competitors all had problems:
* Minix was cheap but not free, and couldn't be redistributed with modifications. People worked around that by maintaining patch sets, but that was even more painful then than it is now (we have better tools now).
* The BSDs were in a quagmire of legal uncertainty and competing claims. Nobody knew for sure if BSD was free or not, so everyone assumed it wasn't.
* Xenix: Not free.
* Microsoft: Are you kidding me?
* SYSV: Not free
* HURD: Didn't work, and had such an elegant architecture that it wasn't clear if it could ever work.
That was the space when Linus Torvalds started hacking around (except HURD didn't even exist yet). If he'd been able to hack on Minix, he would have. But the license prevented it, so he took the opportunity to start his own. Lots of other people saw exactly the same situation and joined him in hacking on something that (a) worked, more or less and (b) they could hack on.
It's not that Linux lucked out and the rest of the competition failed. There was no other competition that satisfied the requirements of being free and hackable. It was also important that Linus was an excellent Benevolent Dictator that gave people few reasons to fork. Actually, on that last point it's rather impressive that Linus is still in charge, even after it's become an incredibly valuable property, used and contributed to by lots of megacorps.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The reason why Linux eclipsed Minix is obvious, since Minix was never more than an educational tool. But why did Linux triumph over BSD? In the early 1990s, FreeBSD was considerably better, more stable, and had a more liberal license. Here are my theories:
1. FreeBSD required a hardware FPU, at a time when many computers didn't have them.
2. The AT&T lawsuit put a lot of uncertainty over BSD.
3. The user communities were very different. Linux users were very open and helpful to newbies. BSD forums were hostile to anyone that didn't already know everything.
3. The user communities were very different. Linux users were very open and helpful to newbies. BSD forums were hostile to anyone that didn't already know everything.
I will go with this. When I reported a bug in the Amiga version of bsd that was causing issues in machines with 4mb of memory. The response from the bsd admins was "well get more memory." I'm intoning it politer here than they responded with too. I interpreted it as "fuck off", which I did.
On the other hand the lead developer of the Amiga 68K kernel, I can't find his name, was very friendly in his emails to me.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
The "more liberal" license might be the problem. While the license for the actual code you get is quite liberal, it doesn't propagate. The GPL ensures that there is always more GPLed code, once you start out from a GPL base. The BSD license is in some way an evolutionary dead end, because it is so liberal that it does not guarantee its own propagation. If I want to contribute to a project and want a guarantee that in turn, I have access to the contributions of people who are using my code, I can't rely on the BSD license. A BSD license means that the only development you are guaranteed to get is your own development. Anything else is just by chance. Your code might be useful for lots of other people, but you stand empty. There is no ROI for your development work if you publish something under BSD license. If you publish the same code under GPL, and even a single other developer shows some interest and adds something to your work, you are guaranteed to get rewarded by additional functionality.
Systemd is a collection of small executables each with a precise goal, in line with the UNIX philosophy. /lib/systemd/systemd-* /usr/bin/systemd-*" if you want to verify this fact.
Do a "ls -alSrh
For me, with a '386 at the time that I first heard of Linux, and with no fpu coprocessor, that was a key factor... although not the defining one, because I was soon going to be getting a '387 anyways. For myself, the deciding factor at the time was that FreeBSD did not support any sort of multiple OS system, where with Linux, I could boot from floppy which would then transfer control over to the hard drive after the kernel was loaded (or after lilo came out, even load the kernel directly from the hard drive), and leave my DOS partitions and the hard drive boot sector completely unaltered.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Consider the following anecdote:
Around 1994 or 1995 I was starting an applied research project that needed an oddball sort of network widget. I e-mailed Alan Cox, whose group was handling most of the Linux network staff at the time, describing what I was trying to do. I got an e-mail back the next day that was basically: "Sounds cool! Ethernet sockets might be able to do the job (draft documentation attached). If not, let me know and we can discuss the best place for you to add a hook to the IP stack." Ethernet sockets were sufficient; I had a basic version of the widget up and running after a couple of long weeks; it was impressive enough that mgmt let me run with.
No way any of the other kernel projects were going to treat me that well.
Linux is not a copy of Minix, the code is quite different.
Yes. Linux and MINIX are both *NIX-style kernels. But MINIX uses a microkernel design while Linux is a monokernel.
Professor Tanenbaum famously told Linus "Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.os.minix/wlhw16QWltI%5B1-25%5D
So anyone who claims that Linux is a "copy" of MINIX really doesn't know what they are talking about.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Systemd is a collection of small executables each with a precise goal, in line with the UNIX philosophy. /lib/systemd/systemd-* /usr/bin/systemd-*" if you want to verify this fact.
Do a "ls -alSrh
And how many of them are dependent on other systemd-* or multiple other systemd-* for functionality or require the systemd PID 1?
Well, no it isn't. Those "small executables" can not function outside the systemd infrastructure. Moreover, systemd people keep trying to expand the range of software that will not build on non-systemd platforms. Please stop your shilling.
He built a teaching OS, a cool ass distributed OS (Amoeba), a good WAN solution on top of it (Globe), and much later the self-healing UNIX-comcompatible Minix 3. That was all while he taught thousands of students how to build shit right. Andy is anything but lazy.
If you read the Linux Kernel Mailing List http://lkml.org/ for a while, you will see why Linux was successful. Over and over again, Linus Torvalds over-rides the antics of his minions and explains to them (again) that the changes they made must be backed out because they break something that users actually need. Linux is elegant and beautiful, but not just because it's a work of art. Linux is the most functional piece of code in existence. It is the beauty of function.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
I think the AC was just confused as Linux's origins are related to MINIX, even if it isn't a clone or shares any code.
From memory, Linux was Torvald's response to the fact MINIX remained a 16 bit operating system. Impatient, Torvald's created the Linux kernel presumably in part because he wanted to create a kernel, but in part to solve the missing 386 Minix issue.
The two were related, but no code from MINIX was present in Linux. As an example, the original Linux file system was a re-implementation of the MINIX file system. Linux's ext family of file systems came later. Early Linux based systems ran the MINIX userland, but this was replaced early on with GNU. It was the replacement with GNU that meant Linux could legally leave the MINIX community and become the kernel of a standalone operating system.
IIRC Linus's original announcement was on the MINIX mailing lists too.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Tozzi overthinks it in the article. The kernel succeeded by being in the right place in the right time and then continuously being good enough that there was insufficient reason for change.
Linux, the OS not the kernel, was the first mostly complete Unix available on a college student's budget that would install on hardware the college student mostly already had. Right place, right time. Hurd didn't exist in any usable form, Minix and Solaris were $$ and the *BSD's didn't start to release for a year or two later.
Fast forward four years and when those graduating college students met the Internet bubble, Linux was the server OS they knew. Right place, right time.
Byeond that it was a game of, "don't eff it up." That's where Torvalds' pragmatism came in to play.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The only difference that results in (resulted in, it's getting better lately) is that BSD-licensed code gets used, while GPL'ed code doesn't get used, for commercial purposes. Furthermore, getting upstream to add your changes is cheaper since you no longer need to maintain them yourself, so companies still have good reasons to contribute back.
The OpenBSD people's take on the matter is:
People sometimes ask if it bothers us that our free work is put into commercial products. The answer is, we would prefer that our good code be widely used rather than have commercial software vendors reimplement and create badly coded or incompatible alternative solutions to already solved problems. For example, it is likely that SSH is a widely used protocol due to this freedom, much more widely used than if restrictions had been placed on how people used the OpenSSH code. If a free SSH solution was not available for vendors to use (in their multitude of rapidly developed products), they would have written or purchased some crummy off-the shelf version instead.
Now, about
If you publish the same code under GPL, and even a single other developer shows some interest and adds something to your work, and in turn decides to distribute that to others, you may get rewarded by additional functionality.
FTFY. It's kind of important to note that as long as you don't plan on distributing your modified version (and in many cases, why would you?) , you're not required to, well, distribute your modified sources.
Then, many modifications will just be horrible hacks to scratch some immediate itch, which you wouldn't at all want in your source base, so GPLing stuff is far from providing a guaranteed enhancement return, even if there is interest.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Did you even know that almost all of the SysV init scripts call out to system-wide scripts? Try running SysV init scripts just by themselves, without having the monolithic SysV init directories in your path. You can't. Ever. Does one thing without dependencies my ass!
For example on Fedora:
# grep -r '.
210
This shows how little you understand the arguments you're making, and the commonly proposed solution of using SysV actually achieves it.
The funny part, of course, is that with systemd the start/stop scripts/programs are indeed standalone in many cases, and the best practices will lead to that naturally. Most of the ones that require systemd only require it because they're using a compatibility layer that calls out to the old script.
No it wasn't that. Andrew Tannenbaum had no intention of using Minux as a general purpose OS kernel like people wanted it to be. He wanted it to be a teaching kernel and thats all. He didn't accept patches for the most part because he wanted it to remain simple enough for an undergrad student to completely understand (I know that because my WANG hard drive patch couldnt be accepted because of that very reason). Even patches to add networking where rejected.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The paranoia around the license might be something; the effects your describe is a misconception on your part, but it is a shared misconception, so it does affect people's behavior.
However, what I think is most important was initial hardware support.
FreeBSD and Linux got a different amount of users in the early times, when Linux had more low-end hardware support (IDE disks, missing FPU, low end network drivers by Donald Becker), and gained a lot of marketshare when the ATT lawsuit was happening.
After that, Linux and FreeBSD grew at the same exponential rate for many years, with FreeBSD having the same marketshare. This changed around Linux 2.6. There are several things that happened around then which may account for the loss of FreeBSD marketshare. For example, Matt Dillon (FreeBSD VM system maintainer) helped Linux implement a VM system that worked about as well as FreeBSDs. This had been one of the major selling points of BSD vs Linux. There are also network effects that started being really significant for Linux, as Linux became bigger than all the other Unixes combined. And FreeBSD kept the port system very similar to how it had originally been developed in the mid 1990s, while open source became more intertwined. This made FreeBSD harder to update compared to many Linux distributions, and became seriously annoying around that time.
Since many things happened around the same time, it's hard to pinpoint the exact reason for the divergence.
Back in '94/'95 when Linux was new I asked Alan Cox a couple questions via email, which he replied. Made some changes to the driver to the ethernet chip we were using, he took those and thanked me. No experience with BSD so I can't contrast/compare.