Linked by David Adams on Wed 29th Oct 2008 21:04 UTC, submitted by irbis
Would the internet as we know it exist without Linux? "Absolutely not", says Rich Menga. "Where Linux shines the most is in its server applications".
In the 1990's "There were thousands of Mom n' Pop ISPs that operated out of a garage and the vast majority of them were all running Linux. Windows couldn't do it back then and neither could MacOS. What would you have used that you could afford? Netware? Lotus Domino? HP-UX (that requires those refrigerator-sized HP servers)? Linux was literally the only OS out there that had the right price (free), ran similar to a Unix and could use existing computers of the time to connect customers.
The internet as we know it today predominantly runs on Linux. There's an extremely high probability that the internet connection you're using right now is connected through a Linux server - and routed through many other Linux servers along the way."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Just look at Hotmail and Yahoo and what year they started. What OS are they using?
Without the rest of the internet I'm afraid that Hotmail and Yahoo don't amount to very much by themselves. You need the ISPs and the web hosters to provide content and access to content that drives demand and makes Yahoo and Hotmail worth something. Most of those run Linux because of the wide range of hardware and platforms it runs on, and off the back of that, the wide range of software that runs on it.
You can't pick two companies that happened to use BSD and say that everything would have been the same I'm afraid.
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Member since:
2006-03-15
Would the internet as we know it today exist without Linux? No, considering there is a lot of Linux out there, it will not.
Would the internet exist today without Linux? Yes, just as cheap and probably with a lot less confusion(distributions). Just look at Hotmail and Yahoo and what year they started. What OS are they using?