Submitted by 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.”
Would the Internet exist without Linux? Yes, very likely.
Would the Internet as we know it exist without Linux? No, not very likely.
In all honesty, had it not been Linux, it’d be *BSD filling up the cheap, garage server rooms the article mention.
Edited 2008-10-29 21:10 UTC
agreed.
to take the what-ifs a step further, it’s just as easy to say, would linux be the linux we know and love were it not for the internet? obviously not.
I think the Internet as we know it would certainly exist. The post-lawsuit BSD variants would have met the need quite nicely. We might not have the comical explosion of distributions that Linux has, but the technological basis and the freedom to develop for the BSD platform would have allowed the thundering hordes contributing to Linux a medium every bit (no pun intended) as accessible.
Nice in theory, but I don’t think so.
With BSD, one can toil away and have satisfaction in producing great code … only to see it adopted by some software megacorp, changed into incompatibility, incorporated into a proprietary product, pushed, advertised, and sold to the public.
The megacorps gets the profit fruits of your labour, and the general public essentially get ripped off. You get virtually nothing.
At least contributing under a copyleft license, the following occurs: (1) other people contribute to your project, so that the code remains open but gets better and better, (2) you get an improved codebase, (3) the code remains open so you get the credit/kudos and continuing visibility for the pieces that you wrote, and (3) the public does not get ripped off.
Everybody wins (except perhaps for the software megacorp).
This I believe is the ONLY reason why you get “the thundering hordes contributing to Linux”.
You just wouldn’t get that happening with the BSD license, IMO.
Edited 2008-10-30 00:31 UTC
While I completely disagree with your assessment of the BSD license, that is a topic for another time. The argument you are using has absolutely nothing to do with the question asked here. Had Linux not been around, BSD could have been used in the cheap server role just as easily. You don’t have to write one bit of code to run a server. And even if you develop an app that runs on *BSD, there’s nothing saying you have to give it a BSD license.
Agreed. BSD is probably better than Linux in a server role.
Disagree. You have to write server applications … such as the LAMP stack itself itself (this could easily have been the BAMP stack instead, I agree) … but then after that in addition you need AJAX, CUPs, Alfresco, Citadel, OpenChange, Samba, LDAP, NFS, Python, Ruby, symfony, Django, Jena, Pylons, Cappuccino, Durpal, web2py, Helma, jitsu, Lift, Wicket … just a few examples … the list is getting quite long by now.
True.
If it were not for the inspiration of the GPL and Linux, however, much of the list of applications above, I believe, would never have even got started.
“Agreed. BSD is probably better than Linux in a server role. ”
since linux was *also* a desktop OS, it was able to gain a lot more mindshare and hardware support and that helped it gain in the server space.
But all of these apps exists because the GPL exists too…. And I’m sure that maybe would exists alternative apps to these….
There is a differing factor between the GPL and BSD. Both GPL and (original) BSD code remain open, but the GPL as a copyleft license has a domino effect. Everything you put in, becomes GPL and the whole can never be closed off without consent of all the contributors, which in practice means that the code stays non-proprietary.
The BSD license is very lenient and that is a very good quality, but it tends to “lose” development and contributions, because of proprietary interests. Every distributed and closed source addition to BSD code is not available in the free eco-system (and must be implemented in BSDL code a second time). As a developer you can have valid reasons to allow this, but you’ll forgo the avalanche effects of the GPL.
I wonder if IBM, Sun, Novell et all, would have contributed to a BSDL ecosphere as “freely” as they did to the GPL ecosphere. The GPL is a good protection against a competitor taking and running off with your code. GPL is a forced joint venture and a completely level playing field. No one can change the rules mid-game. (Except ALL contributors and the FSF with a new version of the GPL, but that is only in conjunction with the GPL upgrade clause).
And yet there are GPL violations occurring every day at companies too lazy to read the license or too indifferent to care. GPL alone isn’t what “saved” linux, it’s the will of the masses who write the code and use it daily.
I’m not going to say the GPL is a bad thing; it’s a great idea in many ways, but to call it the “most free” license as many of its fans do, is highly inaccurate. It is more restricted than nearly all the other open source licenses out there. I understand that those restrictions are absolutely necessary to maintain the philosophical goals, but to call it Free is a gross misnomer.
Also, your example about BSD licensed code being “stolen” for commercial use hurting the community? Have a look at the single most successful commercial use of BSD itself, Apple’s OS X. Not only did a great OS come about, but Apple went above and beyond their legal obligation and opened up the vast majority of the Darwin/Mach code to developers. The only major thing they kept proprietary was their Aqua interface, which is quite understandable and is their right; it’s mostly their own original code after all.
In all honesty, they were BSD. BSD was a primary server os in the 90’s, as was Linux. It still is, in some applications.
We all know that technically BSD would have been more than ready for that takeover of the garage server rooms, and more than that too. When Linux was still young and primitive, BSD was already a well working, stable OS that had a long Unix heritage behind it.
Free versions of BSD had some legal obstacles to overcome in the early nineties but even after those clouds went away, BSD was technically much more advanced than the early Linux still.
The interesting question is therefore: Why didn’t BSD become the most popular free Unix-like OS? Why has Linux been more popular both as a desktop OS and as a server OS, and seems to be supported more by IT companies too?
The article claims that “yes it’s true there were BSDs in ’94 – but it wasn’t exactly easy to get a hold of” – but I’m not sure if that is true either?
BSDs are by no means small niche operating systems only, and they have been and will be widely used in many places, but there’s no denying that Linux has become much more popular, both on desktops and in server rooms, and even as an embedded OS of mobile phones, for example. Why Linux and not BSD?
Edited 2008-10-30 10:03 UTC
Well, no, and this is a fallacy that people keep telling to themselves. The problem with BSD was that people took the code and the network stacks, bunged it into a proprietary box and the code was never seen of again. It’s very difficult to improve and get ahead when people are doing that because you’re not sustaining your project off the back of that success. It’s why I have a good chuckle at people who try to claim that OS X is some sort of success for BSD.
The difference with Linux is that lots of companies collaborate on a level playing field, knowing full well that if they contribute something then even their competitors have no choice but to contribute back if they want something done. That doesn’t happen in a BSD licensed world. All you would get with lots of interested parties involved is a core nucleus of a kernel with no open source drivers, lots of competing binary-only implementations for the same things and lots of overlap between binary-only modules that would destroy the integrity of the kernel. Either that, or you just have no critical mass of companies or interested parties involved at all, as is the case with the BSDs.
You would be very surprised how one thing and decision begets and leads on to another in this type of situation.
[sarcasm]Of course so BSD-like licensed software are bound to fail: Apache, PostgreSQL, *BSD OS (which are working fine thanks) don’t exist in your world?[/sarcasm]
Frankly it’s impossible to know what made Linux a stronger performer than *BSD: the license?, the timing (BSD were first)? the lawsuit? Linus’s qualities?
A mix of all this probably, and Hurd’s failure show that it’s a real possibility that GPL OS could have failed if Linus didn’t start his own kernel..
As *BSD OS are still here (despite their license in your view) they could definitedly have done the job as Internet servers (one of the strong point of the *BSD actually).
the internet existed before linux, so, uhm, yes.
Two possible confisions:
Linux vs. UNIX (the early / commercial ones, and the BSDs)
Internet vs. the Web
It seems to be common that many people do confuse these things, so in my opinion it’s completely valid to say that the Internet would exist without Linux, but definitely not in the form we’re using it today. The hint that the Internet existed before Linux is worth mentioning, as it has already been said.
I think this may be the dummest article ever, it’s exactly like saying roads wouldn’t exist without Ford.
Just goes to prove that you can manipulate statistics to prove anything. 52% of people know that.
“52% of people know that.”
So 48% of people are clueless
meh, 90% of all statistics are made up.
Figures don’t lie.
Liars always figure.
The internet existed 20 years before linux, and if the internet hadn’t of existed, I argue linux would not have been 1% as successful, because the internet allowed easier collaboration and sharing between OSS developers.
Just because most of the internet runs on apache, and *nix, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be some other OS.
Figures don’t lie, but conjectures based on those figures can be wrong. The entire premise can be, and in this case, is.
Without decent, reasonably affordable cars are you going to have massive road growth though?
This is the type of scenario that I see many people just not getting their heads around at all because it requires a domino effect of other factors that they just don’t see.
Edited 2008-10-30 10:38 UTC
How do you know those would not have existed without Ford?
Or maybe it’s because you cant remove arbitrary events from history and make even remotely ccurate predictions about what would have happened without them.
I didn’t say that. I said that roads would not have expanded in the way they did without affordable and decent cars to drive. Ford certainly played their part, but they weren’t the only car manufacturer.
However, you can’t equate Ford simply to Linux in this scenario. Linux was and is a freely available system, funded by its own code contributions that enabled ISPs to run web servers and networking machines where initial cost and license restrictions would basically have stopped them dead. The internet needed scale to exist as it does now, and a sustainable system in Linux provided it.
Well, yer you can because you look at the dependencies.
Roads have been around for 1000s of years. The Romans built roads that still exist in europe today.
Roads existed for all that time because of horses and carts. Roads dramatically increased and were improved this century because of the car. Roman roads themselves have been improved.
The usage of the internet increased into what it is today because of a sustainable and freely available system that actually helped providers to build the internet, and once that could be done more could be done with the internet and demand increased.
The car and road analogy isn’t very accurate because the car drove demand for roads. Free software actually helped build the internet on the scale we see it in a way nothing else could, which meant more could be done which in turn drove demand still further which free software could then meet.
SOme Roman roads are still usable. I don’t know how you can improve on that!
I 2nd that. Not only is this a gross misuse of statistical data but the author clearly does not understand the subject. Stating that ISP servers run linux is actually quite wrong. Actually when it comes to ISPs BSD and unix in general is a little but more common than linux ( at least in my personal experience ). Oh and I really wouldn’t go so far as to say that the power of linux is on the internet. If anything the power of linux is in being free.
And furthermore, without Linux there’d be one or more GNU/BSD distributions running a BSD kernel, GNU userland, and either KDE or Gnome. It would be free software, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people GPLed some device drivers to keep them out of proprietary hands.
errr… or maybe RMS would have delivered on GNU/Hurd.
And FreeVMS would have been a real player.
Of course – or something similar to Linux and BSD, but it would have to be open. A big part of the net always has run on BSDs.
The text may, of course, emphasize Linux too much. But the interesting point in the article is that it points out the importance of free and open tools (Linux, BSD, Apache, net tools, protocols and standards) for the development of Internet. A fact worth remembering.
Creating and maintaining Internet, a global open network, using only proprietary and closed source tools wouldn’t be possible in the sense and so successfully that we have Internet today. Well, technically and in theory it could be possible with closed and proprietary tools too, of course, but not in real life.
A global open network cannot be owned and controlled by a few companies only. An open network needs open tools, standards and technologies.
Like http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/?
I believe it’s backwards: Would Linux Exist Without The Internet?
I think Linux success is because the Internet, that was the way that Linux popularity spread so quickly. As was already mentioned, the Internet was already there when Linux began.
Good point. Linux developer community practically works over the Internet too. But it is mutual too, also Linux has benefited the development of Internet. The success of Linux in the nineties helped many people to have their own, relatively secure and fast home or small office servers running on cheap hardware.
Yes, sure. I agree with that.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t have books about LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) development.
Now This is a heck of a way to correct a really poorly thought out question and conclusion. Thank you So much.
I wish I had mentioned this in the news posting. Linux would most definitely not exist without the internet. No internet = no worldwide network of contributors.
“No internet = no worldwide network of contributors.”
Hey, stop making me feel old! I remember my first exposure to Linux came over Fidonet on BBSs! And yes, some contributors used those.
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?
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.
“how long is a piece of string?”
What a dumb article.
Of course the Internet would exist without Linux. It would just be running mostly on BSD instead.
And as rob mx very correctly pointed out, Linux is a child of the Internet. Without the Internet, Linux would never have become an OS that was even capable of acting as an Internet server. Not without the collaboration of thousands of programmers all over the world on the Internet.
Also, keep in mind that the vast majority of daemons running on the Internet came from the BSD world anyway. BIND, and so on. The Internet most certainly would exist without Linux. And it probably wouldn’t look that much different than it does today.
Edited 2008-10-29 21:50 UTC
Would Linux exist without the internet….
Can we hold the Linux fanboy articles for a while now? Honestly, this is getting ridiculous.
We could have an article about how wonderful Apple is, or how crappy Vista is?
no no, we’ve already moved on to how crappy and restrictive apple is and how great the next version of windows will be and how vista rules, it even runs on netbooks!
n.c.
What kind of retarded article is this? And, no, I haven’t read it yet.
The “Internet” was around a LONG time before Linux was spawned and the WWW was created on a NeXT. The Internet would very much have existed without Linux.
/me revokes Davids linking privs for a week
/me didn’t catch the “as we know it” bit
still…
Edited 2008-10-29 22:19 UTC
Technically yes, in its early forms (FTP, BBS systems etc.). But the article is not talking about the bare technological basis so much as about the success of Internet as a global social phenomenon. Open source software including Linux and the BSDs have been an important thing in the huge growth and fast development of Internet.
The *BSDs have also been around long before Linux. You could download NetBSD in the 1980s.
NetBSD wasn’t out until 1992-1993, it was spun off of 386BSD and mixed with 4.4 BSD-Lite later.
http://www.netbsd.org/about/history.html
Edited 2008-10-30 00:20 UTC
I love BSD.
I hate liars.
NetBSD was released in 1993, BSD itself has it’s origins in the 80’s though.. in the mid 70’s the kernel was mostly AT&T Unix.
Not a reply to you personally but to everyone in general: maybe you could glimpse the actual text of the article at least a bit before writing down a comment…
I’ve become convinced that quite many OSnews commentators hurry writing their “enlightened” comments based on the (often misleading) information they get just after first glimpsing the title of the article and maybe a few first lines of the teaser for maybe two seconds. And may get voted up by a big bunch of other similar guys who may not have bothered to do even that much work studying the actual content and trying to form a balanced view of it.
As to the article in question, yes, the title could be considered stupid and retarded, and some of the content may be biased too. But, I can reveal you a “secret” that might surprise those of you that belong to the big bunch of guys mentioned above: there’s often more to an article than its title and teaser only… Whoah!?! Now, who would have known that…?! :-O
For example, the actual text does admit that it is actually more about free Unix-like operating systems (BSDs etc. besides of Linux) and free and open Unix tools (Apache etc.) in general than just about Linux – although Linux became the most popular variant of a free Unix-like OS: “Linux (and Unix) paved the way for the modern internet”.
Edited 2008-10-30 08:46 UTC
yeah, I went and read it and corrected myself. mostly.
I usually read articles before posting… but..
SUN Had a stranglehold n most internet facing servers. If Linux wasn’t around, I believe that Solaris x86, and the BSDs would reign as internet facing servers.
true, but with one correction. the SUN servers used to power the net were SPARC machines.
That is true. But even in those times, Startups would just buy used SPARC equipment for cheap. Sol x86 I can give you that in a way. Since it didn’t appear til Sol 6 or 7 I believe.
I believe 7 was the first to suport x86, but its been a long time and I myself didnt pick up Solaris till version 7, back when it was new haha.
correction SunOS 5.1 (Solaris 2.1) was the first x86 port, and was around in the internet’s (as we know it) infancy
I stand corrected. Thank you.
Would the internet exist without a free unix such as linux or bsd?
Someone’s been hitting the glue a little too hard… =/
… the phrase: ‘In the 1990’s “There were thousands of Mom n’ Pop ISPs’ is wrong. Everyone knows linux users are 40-something virgins. The chances that there were any ‘pops’ involded are very small. Still smaller is the chance that these garage ISPs actually had any ‘moms’. 🙂
Edited 2008-10-29 23:03 UTC
“If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.”
Linus Torvalds
Linux is a product of the internet age.
As already mentioned – the web is/was grandfathered by DARPA, invented on NeXT (BSD btw), served up by Sun (BSD heritage). Linux would not have happened without all 3 of those things happening.
Linux is a wonderful toy, still is a wonderful toy, will always be a wonderful toy. Thats not to say it isn’t great, it is, it runs on my EEEPC right now in preference to BSD – because Linux is unfocussed, its wanting to be on my server, on my pda, on my netbook, on my desktop. BSD is not, will not, ever be anything other then serious server focussed.
Sure, Redhat/CentOS gives me a true unix-alike OS, and with BlueQuartz makes it simple to administer, but when I want 10,000+ users, with absolute security with serious hardware I’m going to be looking for BSD heritage – and by that I mean Solaris. While not strictly BSD these days, its the evolution beyond, both at the time with SVR4 and again by being at the forefront today.
<edit> Would I run a BSD desktop? Errr nope… Not unless its Mac OS X! </edit>
Edited 2008-10-29 23:07 UTC
According to the graph
http://www.pcmech.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/overallc.gif, it looks like since 2006 Microsoft servers are actually gaining ground on Linux.
That’s because every idiot who gets a two week degree and certificate from MS wouldn’t know what a real server OS looked like if it was sitting in front of them. There are fewer admins that can administer a *nix based server and windows admins are a dime a dozen. I’ve seen windows admins scratch their heads in consternation when a server goes down, “Duh, what happened?”. Try getting one of these guys to administer a linux machine and they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. Scratch that try to get them to administer a BSD machine which is even easier (imo) to administer than Linux, and they would stare at you blankly wondering where the button on the UI is to add a user.
Red Hat(and Suse) has done a lot to make server administration easy and that is why they are so popular in that space, but you still have to have a solid base of knowledge that frankly I don’t see in most windows admins and I think that is rather sad.
Well, that’s Netcraft, but the internet in terms of web server, routers and other infrastructure isn’t going to all start running on Windows any time soon.
Would the internet exist as we know it without Apache?
Probably the more pertinent question. Apache provided a no-cost webserver, free of the deathly embraces of Microsoft, that could run on cheap commodity hardware. Suddenly, anyone could get a website online and you didn’t have to be an expert in IT (though it helped).
If it wasn’t for Apache we could still be in the bad old days of early IIS, with restrictions galore and incessant security problems. Apache made Microsoft get their act together. It also put power in the hands of the masses (as did Linux, of course). And without that power there would be no Google and nothing to search. Hmmn, I wonder how much Google give to the Apache Foundation.
Otherwise, this article rather leaves me feeling “And your point is?” We have to deal with the world as we find it, now. Not as the world may have been if things had been different. Besides, folks will always fiddle and explore and invent and kick against the pricks. It’s wired in. So if it hadn’t been a Finnish guy and Linux it would surely have been, say, a guy from India and something else.
If FreeBSD was good enough for Yahoo, it would have been good enough for the garages. So Linux was not necessary since Berkeley had somehow gotten away with morphing Unix code and it had gotten out to the PC world via Berkeley developers or ex-Berkeley developers.
Probably not. The Internet exists because of *BSD, not because of LINUX.
Ok If we change the title from “Would the Internet exist without Linux ?” to “Would the Web(WWW) exist without Linux ?” maybe we come to something a little closer to what really happened….
Although Tim Berners-Lee may have created the hyper- text transfer protocol on his NeXT machine, there were probably, in the early days of the web boom, more mom & pop ISP’s running linux on cheat 486 platforms than there were manufactured NeXT units.
The *big* difference between the web and the internet which most people simply cannot even remember was that there was no advertising back in the day. People talk about the www dating back to Tim Berners-Lee’s work in 1991, and technically this is true-but that which we know today as the web actually dates back to Oct 1994 when hotwired started running web advertising. And once the advertising began the WWW became something interesting to the commercial world- and hence the explosion of small ISP’s and the www revolution which has so shaped the last 14 years (almost to the day-Oct.27 1994 was the day that hotwired ran those web ads.)
FreeBSD 1.0 came out towards the end of 93, NetBSD predating it by a matter of months. Yet at that time Linux had far better hardware support for the crop of cheap 486 boxes which dominated the market back then. By the time web advertising took off there were probably 10 times as many Linux servers as there were *BSD-based servers. Sun also played a role-but it was surely rather small- Sun hardware was not cheap, and even used was just as expensive as DIY 486 PC’s.
Timing is what makes innovation what it is. And it was the availability of Linux, cheap 486 PC’s, and forward-thinking entreprenuers -ISP’s and web hosts doing web advertisement that created the synergy which got the ball rolling to become the web we know. Could it have happened differently, sure-but that is what actually happened. Did Linux single-handedly create this innovation ?-surely not -if it were not for all the great Free Software (apache, BIND, sendmail, perl etc.) this would not have happened-but that is what Linux has been about since it’s inception-a distribution is a collection of great FOSS software-Linux made apache what it is today and apache helped make Linux what it is today.
One can surely say that it was FOSS software which enabled the innovation which we know nowadays as the Internet (WWW). But Tim Berners-Lee did his work creating http on a proprietary operating system NeXTSTEP. Prior to the birth of the of web there were multiple propietary networks (Compuserver, Prodigy, AOL). Only once the existing academic network became available to the general public, ie. became Open, did Tim Berners-Lee work become really significant. And only when the the propietary networks gave way to the open Internet(and this primarily to enable universal email) did the World Wide Web revolution become that which has changed our lives so much in that last 15 years.
Linux, in the first instance, was the the right tool for the right job at the right time in this story.
Well the article has little fact behind it, and I wonder if it was intended to be deliberate irony, rather than fanboy rubbish. The internet predated the WWW by decades and the web itself was simply not built on linux, it kicked off around the same time, and the web was growing like mad before Linux was even practical as a server. Linux was a relative late comer, and even then linux didn’t have a sizeable market share of the www’s server hardware until the late 90s, by then the web was well up and running and growing like crazy all without Linux. Somehow this has become suppressed knowledge, that linux has a formidable market share now seems to justify the historical non-fact that it’s always been that way. A lot of infrastructure had been laid down long before linux become popular as a server, UNIX and other variants like BSD and SunOS(later solaris) and whatever bearing most of the load. There were also plenty of NT based systems I recall working on in the 90s. Linux only really got traction from about 1995 onwards when there were distributions other than Slackware, such as Novell’s distros and so on from there. I recall not seeing or hearing of linux servers in the enterprise environment in the 90s but suddenly in 1999 it was the thing to do. You might say there’s been a explosion of internet growth since linux, but then your forgetting it’s always been exploding since Tim Berners-Lee said hey.. hey dood, i has an idea. That’s just my subjective experience and I do agree the DIY web crowd got moving on linux a little earlier though. Yet the reverse claim that linux couldn’t exist without the internet is entirely the truth, and I say again, the internet was not built on Linux, although it runs a good chunk of it now. If Linux didn’t exist, say Linus fell of a bike when he was 12, something else would have filled the void, possibly Hurd. Oh and the internet would still be here just the same.
if not linux then some other free unix. But the internet would not be so pervasive if it was built on Windows and Mac servers.
oh and… Hurd’s not going anywhere.
My ISP back in the day ran FreeBSD so they could run apache, etc. At the time Linux was not even on the map yet, as the kernel had not even hit 2.0. So yes, IMO the net would have existed the same way we know it to be today. 386BSD was released in March of 1992. Linux 1.0 was not released until March 1994. Linux started in 1991 with the now famous post, however 386BSD beat it to the punch.
Though Linux is good for prompting open source and has given people more choices than ever, but it is still not so professional to me…
Wow, there’s just so much wrong with this article it makes my brain hurt.
Most importantly:
Internet > HTTP(S).
Linux wasn’t all that hot in 1994 either.
Also, Apache wasn’t released until 1995…
Probably not but that doesnt mean we would have been worse off. If it hadn’t been Linux it would have been something else.
Unless you are on dialup, not that likely really. More likely it’s connected to a big iron DSLAM or similar.
Even less likely. While Linux (and BSD) is a capable routing platform it’s not the most common ones, especially not in the backbone.
Edited 2008-10-30 06:05 UTC
“the internet connection you’re using right now is connected through a Linux server – and routed through many other Linux servers along the way.”
God help us all
was at the time, in court because of someone suing FreeBSD. That opened up a small window frame so Linux could gain momentum. If FreeBSD had not been sued, then FreeBSD would have taken Linux’ place. And Linux would not have been developed.
According to history.
With all due respect to Linus (he’s truly exceptional), he was not well ahead of his time. Consider Von Braun. Without him, America would have most likely never reached the moon (we still can’t go back, with all this new technology). If not Einstein, we would be decades behind in theoretical physics and technology alike.
I don’t think without Linus the Internet would be significantly less developed than it is today. Things would have been done a little differently, but BSD or something similar would have come to the rescue. Just like the DNA’s structure would have been discovered without Watson, the other team was quite close to getting it as well. The radio would have been invented without Marconi, too. The time was just so ready for it.
Linus is like Henry Ford, but not like the Wright brothers. This is just my opinion — someone might point out a fact that could change my mind.
Would the internet as we know it exist without Linux? Probably not. Part of the .com boom in the ’90s can be contributed to Linux and Apache, which allowed ISP’s to host multiple websites on a single server.
The REAL question is whether Linux would exist, as we know it, without the internet? The internet was inevitable, Linux or not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube