Over the past two days the news that CERN discovered a particle that has all the features of the Higgs boson physicists have been looking for for decades had a huge coverage in the mainstream media and on the Internet.

Obviously, the comments were focused on the implications of this discovery for our understanding of the secrets of the universe, also to try to make the general public who have no knowledge in this field understand it. However, yesterday, on the social network Reddit a user who is also a physicist working at CERN opened a thread about the discovery of the Higgs boson which concerns the role of the Linux operating system in this research.

From the beginning, CERN has used open standards and is among the scientific organizations that signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The world-wide-web was invented at CERN and donated to the world, so it’s natural that they’re using free software. In 2007, Richard Stallman, a founder of the GNU project, visited CERN and gave a speech on free software.

ROOT was developed at CERN, an object-oriented software for data analysis initially designed exactly for data analysis in the field of particle physics. The ATLAS and CMS experiments, namely those that last wednesday have announced the preliminary results of their research on the Higgs boson, are using ROOT. The nickname of the user who wrote on Reddit is d3pd, which is the name of the file created by ROOT in the ATLAS experiment.

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To run their computer network, at CERN they use Scientific Linux, a distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux derived from a product of Fermilab later developed in collaboration with CERN itself, and Ubuntu. The CERN website has a section dedicated to Linux, which inevitably is devoted primarily to Scientific Linux.

The Linux operating system and other free software such as ROOT were used to carry out the search for the Higgs boson. This demonstrates once again the power and reliability of Linux for its use with any type of task.