What ever happened to that little OS that we used to hear so much about?

On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, sent the fateful message to USENET announcing his creation. On August 25, 2012, the OS will be 21 years old. If Linux were human and an American citizen, it would then be old enough to consume adult beverages, carry concealed weapons (at least in Pennsylvania), and have all of the privileges of U.S. citizenship, with the exclusion of becoming the President. My, how our beloved OS has grown!

While a retrospective for a 21-year-old human might seem somewhat pretentious, the same can't be said for a 21-year-old operating system. I think computer years compare even less favorably to human years than do dog years, so by now Linux must be comparatively over a century old. So please indulge me while I review the accomplishments and history of our virtual centenarian.

Linux: The Early Years

Soon after our little OS was born and became functional, it teamed up with the gang from GNU, which provided all of the neat tools that made it a productive citizen. Soon, GNU/Linux found its way onto the desktops of the many computers that were cast off because they were insufficiently powerful to run the latest iterations of the Windows operating system. The plentiful, free hardware combined with the powerful, free software yielded a combination that proved irresistible to the geek community. A wonderful period of experimentation followed, and the projects created at home were smuggled into the corporate world, unbeknownst to the high priests of IT. Once "inside," Linux clandestinely subsumed the duties once performed by expensive, proprietary, and many would say less-reliable systems. Standard network services like DHCP, DNS, FTP, and Web servers were all handled with ease.

Once Linux had proven itself robust in the corporate network, those who were responsible for the infiltration gained the confidence to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, and let management know what they had done. As word of its virtues spread through the business community, savvy managers had to take notice. An economic ecosystem started to build around the OS and the open-source licensing model it used. Vendors of commercially supported distributions, such as Red Hat, were formed, and a thriving Linux/open-source consulting community followed. Fortune 500 companies started implementing Linux deployments, at first to replace their aging UNIX installations but later completely new ones. Even our favorite midrange system vendor was quick to recognize the advantages and ported the OS first to their flagship zSeries mainframe and then later to their Power CPU-based systems. And on the other end of the hardware spectrum, Linux found itself embedded into routers, firewalls, and entertainment devices for both enterprise and home. It was a great time to be a Linux acolyte, and for the OS there seemed to be no limit.

Linux Grows Up

As Linux gained notoriety for its performance and versatility, its influence in the world of IT grew as well. While many business entities were delighted with the savings and reliability, not all were as enamored. A malevolent force from the northwestern part of the United States saw this little upstart as a threat to its attempt to build a monopoly in the computing world. While this force would be outwardly dismissive of any such threat, a series of leaked internal memos known collectively as the "Halloween Documents" told a different tale. It considered Linux and open-source software to be a major threat to its dominance. So it reacted as any bully does, first by using a tactic that had worked so well in squelching an earlier threat to its business: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Those who have been in this business for a couple of decades will recognize IBM's OS/2 operating system as the victim to which I refer. Ironically, the bully killed its own offspring as it had partnered with IBM to develop OS/2 in the first place.

To build the FUD bomb, the evil one brought out of its bag of dirty tricks one of its favorites: litigation. Keeping in mind that it had its own gaggle of lawyers busy defending its nefarious tricks against an onslaught by the United States Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, it had to find a litigant proxy. It found one in a company called SCO, whose own lunch was being eaten by Linux and open-source, SCO being a vendor of a high-quality UNIX variant. In this charade, SCO sued IBM over intellectual property rights claiming that the IP ensconced in UNIX, which it had purchased, was also being distributed illegally via Linux. Since IBM was a prominent (and wealthy) distributor of Linux products, it made a good target.

How does a relatively tiny company like SCO get the financial cajones to sue a financial behemoth such as IBM? Easy...the evil one offered to preemptively pay "licensing fees" to SCO for any intellectual property that may have found its way into any of their products. This made for a great way of funding their proxy's litigation and a way for them to get some great press. After all, if they were willing to directly send a reported $6 million to SCO for licensing fees, then there must be something to the lawsuit, right? (The evil one also funneled another $106 million to SCO through another means, but that's another story.) As hoped, Linux and open-source adoption in the business world slowed as the corporate lawyers were loathe to bet their business on software that could end up costing them huge amounts should the lawsuit be settled in SCO's favor.

History reveals that IBM, to its credit, didn't take the potentially cheaper "pay them off" tactic and settle the lawsuit. Had it done so, the trajectory of Linux and open-source may have been completely different. Instead, it tackled the issue head on. With the help of the open-source community, IBM was able to prove the provenance of Linux and the GNU tools, thus getting a judgment in its favor.

What this dark period did do was prompt the Linux/open-source community to take a hard, long look at its processes and policies for code submission. While there was a massive scramble by the open-source community to generate the necessary examples of "prior art" required to prove the true origins of the contested IP, future legal attacks will be met with an excruciatingly detailed paper trail. This whole episode taught the community that if Linux and open-source were to play in the cutthroat  commercial world, then it would have to behave in a more business-like manner. It was time to grow up, and it did. Once the pall of litigation passed, the Linux train started to pick up steam again, stronger than ever.

What became of SCO? The smoking ruins of a once-decent business faded into obscurity, struggling to maintain a niche business while filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. According to their Web site, another group, UnXis, purchased the company and its UNIX assets early in 2011. SCO became another entry in the list of companies whose association with a certain company caused their death, much like a male black widow spider gets eaten by the female after mating.

Linux: The Mature OS

So here we are in 2012. What has our little OS ecosystem grown into?

The developer community is still alive and well, with a great deal of support from the commercial world. IBM is still a proponent of Linux and frequently donates code back to the projects. Red Hat, one of the earliest commercial vendors, is a major player and contributor that has grown into a multi-billion dollar open-source company. Red Hat's Enterprise Linux is the base for two popular, community-supported distributions: CentOS and Scientific Linux. Curiously, it also is the base for Oracle's entry to the commercial Linux world. A German company, SuSE, who was a major competitor to Red Hat, was purchased by Novell of "Novell Networks" fame. Novell has teamed up with Oracle to provide a solid Linux/Oracle DBS package that will be attractive to those who prefer Oracle to DB2. Not to feed the rumor mill, but Oracle recently purchased Sun Microsystems, steward of Java and maker of exquisite hardware. Can an Oracle purchase of Novell be in the making? Even the formerly malevolent force from the northwest has become a contributor to the open-source world, opening its specs to developers of such projects as Samba and contributing code to the kernel. I'm under no illusions with respect to the motivations of that company, but it is refreshing to see that they can play nicely with the other companies.

As for Linux itself, the OS continues to evolve. Recently, Linus Torvalds declared the kernel to have reached version 3. In the old days, a kernel would get a new version number once a significant number of improvements and features had been made to it. The reason that Linus declared "3.0"? Because he felt that the 2.x series had been around long enough and the '.x' numbers were getting too large. This shows that the kernel code and its feature set has matured. I remember looking forward to each new kernel version as it usually was accompanied by a major improvement in performance or some exciting features. Now I greet each release with a yawn...they're just stepwise improvements. And I'm fine with that because, as I age, I no longer look for "cutting-edge" stuff. I like the tools I use to be stable, and Linux has sure reached that benchmark for me. It "just works."

Linux continues to be embedded in routers and wireless routers but has expanded into flat-screen televisions, smart phones, NAS devices, and more. I don't see that ending anytime soon. The Ubuntu distribution, which targets Windows users and Linux newbies, has made it clear that it sees the future to be more toward "pad" computers. Its recent 11.10 release created quite a bit of controversy by unapologetically replacing the familiar Gnome interface with one obviously tuned to one-finger navigation. I haven't checked distrowatch.com lately (Distrowatch tracks various Linux and BSD distributions) to see what's available, but I don't think it will be too long before more distributions follow suit. It all depends upon whether pads are fads or here to stay.

What's the future for Linux? Will it ever conquer the desktop? I doubt it. It hasn't been able to do so up until now, and if the desktop truly goes away, as the pundits claim it will, the time has passed. There will always be a hardcore group that will use it there (I'm looking in the mirror), but I agree with the pundits. The desktop will eventually be relevant only in the business world, and we know who owns that market. On the other hand, its use on business servers continues to grow, and according to recent reports, at the expense of the northwestern company. It keeps being embedded in new products, popping up in the darnedest places.

Linux/open-source is no longer blazing a trail through uncharted territory. It has matured into a reliable, respectable, and business-acceptable choice for everything from the smallest to the largest platforms. With a presence in so many places, I can see nothing but a long run for this thing!