Submitted by “In many ways the virtues that have brought Linux from a Unix look alike pet project to a competitive operating system are the same as the ideals behind DefCon. The community stood on each other’s shoulders and developed piece after piece of software to fill in the gaps that were found through use. Programmer’s built on the ideas of others creating tighter and tighter code to support an increasingly complex framework.”
This is partially fiction. The primary reason that Linux even had a chance at all of becoming competitive was not because of the overall community but, rather, because of large contributions from commercial organizations such as IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and others. Otherwise, it would have ended up as yet another BSD-ish project which, while laudable and very useful, has never really had much of an impact on the market.
“The primary reason that Linux even had a chance at all of becoming competitive was not because of the overall community but, rather, because of large contributions from commercial organizations such as IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and others.”
And what’s your arbitrary reason for declaring Red Hat, Novell, IBM and others not part of the community? They certainly don’t act as a monolithic bloc, but each follow their own interests. One interest they all share is in being part of the Linux community.
Disparate entities contributing to a common cause sounds like a community to me.
Edited 2008-08-17 05:36 UTC
Not really. There was that legal issues about BSD and its source back in the early days of Linux. So marketing Unix and making your one flavor was risky. Linux was close enough to Unix (as far as most users are concerned) To make it a safe alternative (legally).
IBM got swindled by Microsoft on OS/2 so they wanted to get back at them. Linux was a viable alternative as they can accept and use without huge legal hurtles or spending money, without the risk at the time of using BSD code (which they used for their version of UNIX, but to much licencsing and legal issues to give away at a low cost, as well compared with Linux at the time it was far more complex)
As for RedHat they figured if they can smooth out getting Linux to work and give good defaults and tools preinstalled as a CD (As most people only had 14.4k – 28.8k modems, and downloading 600mb took around a week to download) And still without the legal hurtles that BSD offered it made it an easy way to make money. Vs. spending years developing your own version.
It’s not arbitrary. IBM and other commercial concerns made contributions to Linux that either wouldn’t have been possible (eg. IBM donated tons of patents and source code) or would have taken YEARS longer than the larger community could have done them. So, in other words, Linux as we know it would PRIMARILY not have been possible without the contributions of commercial organizations. Sure, individuals in the community contributed, but their contributions pale by comparison.
As you can see here http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html, BSD absolutely dominates the uptime list. I think it still does have great impact on server market and I love to use FreeBSD for my servers
And please note another “niche market” UNIX OS that nobody* knows anymore: IRIX. And BSD/OS, derived from the 4.4BSD Lite, just as FreeBSD.
*) “Nobody” refers to the vast majority both of computer users and oh joy oh market share analysts. 🙂
Not to Dis BSD however Uptimes like that are not normal or recommended. As well Uptimes doesn’t even explain the load or actual function. as well people could in theory hack the information to give the impression it was still up and the same server even as they replace them and swap them in and out. Those guys seem to be focused on keeping that system up and running as long as humanly possible. Chances are if it goes down it will never come back up (drives may have died a year ago and still running off the paging)
I disagree with two points here…
Red Hat was and is a part of the community and just happened to become a corporate player as well. IBM and Novell didn’t take a risk on this pet project called Linux and make it a success. No, they jumped on board after Linux was already a success. Yes, IBM (and Novell to a lesser degree) have helped improve corporate acceptance of Linux amongst the techo-neophyte manager types who unfortunately make corporate technology decisions, but they are not the reason behind Linux’s success.
First, BSD has had a huge impact on the market. Not only is it the base upon which OS X was built, but look at the battle it won against AT&T. That was a huge win for the market.
Second, FreeBSD is an incredible project. I wouldn’t regard it less simply because it doesn’t have as strong a corporate following as Linux seems to have.
I think you under estimate the effect that BSD has had on the market. A lot of web servers run on the BSD’s. Also a plethora of networking devices. Since BSD doesn’t require disclosure, there is no way to tell how many devices have benefited from the code. Hell, even Microsoft has used code from the BSD camp in their products. Let us not forget that it is also the base of OS X.
As for Linux, GNU software was already making waves in the industry before Linus wrote his kernel. For years Unix admins would remove the tools that came with their mainframes and replace them with a set from GNU. Do you think its just coincidence that many of the tools use the exact same flags and options? Unix admins have been adding code to the projects for decades. I won’t argue that big business has helped Linux into the mainstream, most major coding projects were around long before Linux was corporate.
Edited 2008-08-17 04:36 UTC