Linux, the open-source operating system that has been the only real threat to Microsoft's dominance, turns 10 on Saturday, or around Saturday.
An operating system isn't as much born as it is delivered, over several months or years, to a computer-using public that can choose to adopt the sucker. In that sense, it's hard to pin down its birth to a specific day.
That's especially true of Linux, an operating system that grew up everywhere, helped along by hundreds (and then thousands) of kind souls all over the world. We know from whose loins the OS sprang -- Linus Torvalds, the Finnish open-source poster-boy -- but we also know his work wasn't the whole story.
Still, it was his idea. On August 25, 1991, Torvalds sent a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup, saying he had been working on a small OS for his Intel 386 computer.
"This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months," he said, "and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them. :-)"
But implementation was Linux's game. Over the next several years, developers joined the Linux bandwagon by the dozens, mostly because they were seduced by the possibility of building an OS that was different from the others out there -- especially from the one built by Microsoft, which was itself growing mighty.
"The only way I know how to describe it is that all the stars in the heavens lined up," said Bob Young, the chairman of Red Hat, one of the first companies to start a business around Linux.
"You get a kid in Finland who arrives at university saying I need a better OS for the PC that I've been hacking in. He happens to be a really good software architect and a nice guy, a good project leader. So things just took off."
Oh yeah, and the Internet was also becoming big at the time, which played a part, too, in Linux's rise. Young said the fact that Torvalds and others working on Linux knew how to work remotely, and that they figured out how to code software without ever having "hung out and had a beer," was essential to the new OS's development.
"The Linux project as demonstrated by the way Linus drives the kernel project (was) really powerful because these guys grew up on the Internet," Young said. "They didn't have to unlearn previous ways of doing software development."
What happened next has been well documented: Linux became the buzz. Companies like Young's were formed, the financial markets got their teeth in them, and suddenly open-source operating systems were huge business. This frenzy occupied Linux between 1997 and 2000 -- between ages six and nine -- and, this year, it died out faster than it grew.
But despite the downturn in the "capital markets," the OS, said Young, is still doing well -- and the movement it spurned is doing even better.
"What drove our engineers to give up their careers for this flaky software business that gave away its software was this open-source model," he said. "It got them out of bed in the morning -- to know that they were helping all their programming friends."
According to Miguel de Icaza, the chief technologist at Ximian, "big companies are contributing a lot of code to the OS, because it gives (them) the chance to differentiate themselves in other realms. The operating system has been commoditized," he said.
Ximian sells a version of the GNOME desktop for Linux, which is a user interface that makes the operating system easier to work in. One of the barbs Linux has had to endure the most has been the claim that the OS might be OK for computer experts, but that most of the people who prefer buttons-and-boxes operating systems like Windows could never get used to Linux's texty terrain.
De Icaza said that's a non-issue these days. "You can do a full installation without ever typing a Unix command," he said. "It's as easy as Windows, and the problem is that it's difficult for people to migrate. But in places where they're just starting to use computers, there's a compelling case to start using Linux these days."
But will Linux ever catch up to Windows? Perhaps that isn't the point, said Tim O'Reilly, the tech-publishing exec who sponsored the first conference on open-source issues.
"At least in the earlier years a lot of the focus was, 'We're going to displace Windows.' Of course the fact is that Microsoft plans to displace Windows itself," he said, referring to Microsoft's .Net strategy, which could be thought of in a broad sense as an "Internet operating system."
O'Reilly has suggested that open sourcers turn away some of their attention from winning the desktop and instead try to beat Microsoft at this Internet strategy. It is a somewhat controversial plan, but already there are devotees. De Icaza, at Ximian, has himself formed a project to develop an open source version of .Net.
And perhaps this movement can be seen as Linux's biggest contribution so far to the computing world, many in the Linux community suggested. "It's going to be more difficult for Microsoft or Oracle or any other monopoly to extend their monopolies in this new world," Young said.
