On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds (photo ©Krd) announced in a message on the comp.os.minix newsgroup the project of a new operating system that actually diverged considerably from Minix. Unhappy with the Minix license, Torvalds adopted a license from the GNU project, the GPL, which seemed to him free enough. After a few weeks, the first Linux kernel was released. The availability of various components released by the GNU project and the contributions of several people who joined the project helped to spread it. Thirty years later, Linux is being used by virtually everyone in one way or another, even if only a small minority realize it.
By now, various books have been written about the history of the Linux operating system and how a hobby project created by a college student became a global success present in a lot of ways in very different devices. The adoption of the GPL license allowed the creation of a free and open operating system that was chosen for very different needs because it was relatively easy to adapt it to hardware of very different types. Precisely because it is released under a GNU license, many believe it would be more correct to call it GNU/Linux.
The development of the Internet favored the spread of the project, which is also ideal for the servers on which the various Internet services run. In just a few years, Linux became dominant in the field of servers, establishing itself as part of standard platforms along with the development of the web. On the user side, Linux is present as well in routers. Many years later, the development of the Internet of Things was also possible thanks to the use of the Linux operating system.
Linux was also ported to mainframes and over time became dominant in the field of supercomputers. In 2000, IBM invested the first billion dollars in Linux systems. It was only the beginning of a partnership that culminated with the acquisition of Red Hat, the largest company that leverages Linux commercially by offering its distribution with updates and assistance.
In 2008, Google launched the Android mobile operating system, based on the Linux kernel. Android and other Linux kernel-based operating systems have been ported to so-called smart devices by various manufacturers.
Microsoft has been a sworn enemy of Linux for years, particularly in the years when Steve Ballmer was its CEO and insulted Linux and the open source movement in general calling them a cancer and communists. Today, with Satya Nadella as CEO, Microsoft is one of the contributors to the Linux kernel, and Windows 10 has a subsystem called Windows Subsystem for Linux, a compatibility layer for running ELF-format Linux programs under Windows. If you can’t beat them, join them.
Today, PCs are the only type of device where Linux is not dominant. For years there have been prejudices, often unmotivated, by people who assumed that Windows had to be reinstalled every 6 months to work decently and accepted the mess created by Windows software but believed that Linux was complicated. Some jobs require software that isn’t available for Linux but for the average user the current availability of free / open source software is broad enough. In one way or another, today, anyone who uses devices that can be called computers uses Linux but most don’t realize it. It’s a kind of silent domain that comes as no surprise to the people who know what’s behind Linux, GNU, and free / open source software in general.
