The rise and rise of Linux

It is 10 years since Linus Torvalds set out to design and build a challenger to Microsoft's ubiquitous operating system. Linux is now here to stay, but its journey towards popularity has not always been straightforward. Here's the story so far ...

In 1991 Linus Torvalds set out on a project that would ultimately become one of the biggest computing hits for the last 20 years.

Ten years on, the penguin is still going strong and continues to make waves in all areas of the technology sector. Perhaps Torvalds' dream of toppling the Microsoft desktop monopoly will never be realised, but it will certainly give the Redmond giant a run for its considerable amount of money.

The feeling that Linux had risen to become a serious Microsoft competitor was compounded last year when IBM jumped well and truly on the Linux bandwagon by porting its mainframes over to Red Hat.

Whether this was more of a marketing scam to put further pressure on the old adversary is still unclear, but it does tell us a few things.

Big Blue is not the type of company that would back a technology it doesn't believe in and, as such, we can all assume that Linux is here to stay and that it has a huge part to play in future enterprise computing.

"It continues to look extremely positive for Linux," said Colin Tenwick, vice president and general manager for Europe, Middle East & Africa at Red Hat. "If you look at all the research carried out by the likes of IDC, it shows that Linux is continuing to grow in the server market."

Although Linux has a lot going for it, everything eventually comes down to money. How many of us use Linux? Sure, the majority will have played with it, and a fair number will have it as their web server, but is that as far as it goes?

How many businesses have migrated their servers over to Linux and are running the operating system (OS) for mission critical applications? Beyond this, a negligible number have Linux on the desktop, and Microsoft claims 90 per cent of the market.

The point is that, although Linux has been in the news almost constantly over the past two years, has anything really changed? True, it is still the darling of the techie underworld, but that won't worry Bill Gates too much.

Business brains

If the truth be told, Linux should be doing better than it is. Although companies such as Red Hat and SuSE are at the forefront of its adoption, neither have the shrewd business brain of Microsoft.

How would you go about persuading the IT manager at a small business that they really need to migrate over to Linux if they are to reap the true rewards of computing?

You could say that it is cheaper. You could also say that it is more reliable, less likely to be hacked and has a lot of hardware and software support - something that held the OS back in the past. But users don't care about this. Users care about support, usability and familiarity.

This is something that only Microsoft can deliver on the kind of scale users demand today.

Kernel mustard

Only a couple of months ago kernel 2.4 of the Linux OS was launched, but apart from copying Microsoft in its late arrival, there was nothing really spectacular to report. It was released with a whimper rather than a bang, and most people are none the wiser as to the benefits it really brings.

Most of the changes were to do with hardware support, for example USB, Intel's 64-bit Itanium, and IBM's zSeries. Other changes include improved performance, support for file sizes up to 2Gb and increased memory support.

Despite this, the penguin still has a lot of work to do and, although the likes of Red Hat are certainly paving the way forward, there is still a long way to go before it reaches the level of Microsoft.

Whereas in the past Linux was found on many DNS, web and mail servers, the future looks far more interesting. It was touted as the perfect OS for use on embedded devices, PDAs such as the Palm and G3 phones, and this ideal may still be realised. But to topple the Microsoft monopoly, it is the desktop market that Linux is going to have to conquer.

"The desktop market is a lot more difficult in two ways," explained Tenwick. "It is more difficult to measure - consumers can easily replace an OS - and there is a huge incumbent already in place. Despite this, we believe that 20 per cent of our worldwide sales are for desktop systems."

In a recent poll by Linux.com, workstation and desktop machines gained 38.5 per cent of 14,500 votes as to what area will prove most important to Linux over the coming years. The list included, among others, embedded systems, PDAs, general servers and clusters.

But the fact is that, along with the irresistible Microsoft marketing machine, Windows is improving all the time.

Windows 2000 saw great improvements over NT4, and if the company can follow this with the impending release of XP (in Network News' initial tests of beta versions the software seemed stable, easy to use, but extremely greedy with resources) then Microsoft will gain even more ground.

Until recently, Linux has experienced most of its success in the local authority and education sectors where financial constraints are an equal consideration to both reliability and support.

In large-scale financial and manufacturing sectors this is simply not the case. Solaris has been the dominant force there, and will continue to be for a few years to come.

Although Sun Microsystems has traditionally held competition at bay in the web hosting arena, there are signs that this is beginning to change. Because of the associated costs and the expertise required to maintain this kind of set up, it was only a matter of time before another company tried to capitalise on the situation.

At first it was Linux alone that could deliver a similar kind of performance without the associated cost, but support was still missing. However, last year things took a turn for the better when IBM announced that it would port Red Hat Linux over to its portfolio of mainframes.

In one of Europe's biggest cases, Swedish internet service provider and telecoms company Telia pulled 70 web hosting Sun servers from service and replaced them with a single IBM zSeries G6 server that hosted over 1500 simultaneous Linux servers.

The benefits of this approach mainly revolve around manageability, but robustness also comes into play. Looking after the type of data that Telia needs will always be a nightmare, but having it all in the same place, coupled with the failover advantages that a single mainframe hosting 1500 virtual servers holds, certainly helps.

"This allows us to rethink our pricing structure for internet services and offer customers a more affordable web application service," explained Henrik Wulff Riedl, chief financial officer at TeliaNet. "Telia wants to give higher availability and reliability to its customers while saving costs at the same time."

Playing the game

In the past, the growth of Linux was limited by its poor support of applications. This has been greatly improved with thousands of drivers made available over the last two or three years. One area where it continues to fall down, however, is games.

Although this may not seem like such an important point for businesses, it is crucial to any OS. Games account for a huge amount of home computer use and, while this may seem incidental, the adoption of an OS into a desktop environment is all about familiarity.

If your users have come in to contact with a particular OS at home, then migrating over to it in the workplace will prove much less stressful.

The Linux community must improve its support for games and build in better support for advanced graphics engines which will help to drive this on.

Of course, much of this is out of our hands. You simply can't go to a high street retailer and buy a PC bundled with Red Hat Linux.

Maybe this would be the first nail in the Microsoft coffin. If anti-monopoly laws happened to rule against Microsoft and insist that all new PCs came with a choice of OS, then things could really begin to speed up.

However, Tenwick plays this down. "Although a number of manufacturers have started to offer Linux as an alternative - most notably Dell - this is not really aimed at the consumer market," he said. "The reality is that, until we get extremely tight transparency between Windows applications and Red Hat, it is unlikely to happen."

We have all benefited from the growth of Linux - whether directly or not. Those that have migrated over to the OS will have experienced vast improvements in performance, reliability and price - even if this came at the expense of support and training.

Those businesses that have not migrated will benefit from Microsoft's response to the threat of Linux. The software giant was forced to look long and hard at its offering.

For the first time in a decade Microsoft realised that it will have to improve dramatically if it isn't to let another technology steal its thunder.

Whichever way you look at it, Linux has revolutionised the IT sector, and long may it continue.

THE HISTORY OF LINUX

If you go back 10 years, the OS market was a different world. DOS was the most widespread computing platform, and although Mac OS was generally seen as superior, it was also far too expensive. Unix, like today, was aimed squarely at the enterprise that had plenty of expertise, and money on top.

In 1991, Linus Benedict Torvalds was a second-year student of computer science at the University of Helsinki. At 21 he possessed the fresh-faced arrogance required to believe he could write a better OS than was currently on the market and, inspired by the work of Richard Stallman on the GNU project, he set about it with gusto.

In a posting sent to the Minix news group, Torvalds stated that he was "doing a free OS - just a hobby, it won't be big and professional".

Little did he know. By the end of 1991, Linux had reached version 0.95 and was available worldwide through a number of ftp sites.

Before long, the Linux bandwagon could not be stopped. Thousands of programmers got hold of the source code and played about with it. Each kept coming up with their own opinions, improvements and advice. It was now only a matter of time until the commercial vendors stepped in.

In one of the greatest Linux success stories, researchers at Los Alamos national laboratory used Linux to run 68 PCs as a single parallel processing machine to simulate atomic shock waves.

This was in April 1996. The system cost $152,000 in total - about a tenth of the cost of commercially produced alternatives - and reached 19 billion calculations per second. This made it the 315th most powerful computer of its day, and after three months had still not been rebooted.