Linux Is 25 and Everywhere — How It Ruined Microsoft's Plan to Rule the World | QDaily Business History

Linux changed the world. Linus, though, hasn't changed one bit.

Today, wherever you are, it is hard to get through the day without using Linux.

More than 2 billion people carry an Android phone every day, and Android is built on Linux.

Even if you're not on Android — even if you're reading this article on an iPhone, a Mac, or a Windows PC — Linux still had a hand in it. Like the vast majority of websites, QDaily's servers run Linux.

You can avoid Microsoft's operating system. You can avoid Apple's hardware. Linux alone is inescapable.

Of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers, 80% run Linux — machines that cost anywhere from hundreds of millions to billions of yuan. At the same time, mini computers no bigger than a cherry, selling for just 33 yuan, run a full Linux operating system too.

Even Microsoft's own cloud computing platform brought in Red Hat's enterprise Linux operating system two weeks ago — Red Hat being the most commercially successful company in the entire Linux world.

All of it began in 1991, with the side project of a Finnish student.

A Student Project That Began in 1991

On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds, a sophomore at the University of Helsinki, posted a thread titled "What would you like to see most in minix?" on the MINIX newsgroup (comp.os.minix). It read:

Hello, everyone using MINIX, Greetings! I'm currently writing a (free) operating system for 386 (486) AT machines (just a hobby — it won't be as big and professional as GNU). I started preparing this project in April, and it's nearly there now. Because my operating system is somewhat similar to MINIX (mainly in how the file system is physically laid out, mostly because that's practical), I'd like some feedback from all of you on whether you like MINIX. ...some technical details...

— Linus ([email protected])

This offhand post, stuffed with parenthetical asides, is where Linux started.

Torvalds began his studies at the University of Helsinki in 1990. The first computer operating system he met was Ultrix, a version of Unix sold by the American company DEC. It was also the first Unix system the university owned.

Unix, born at AT&T Bell Labs, was then the main operating system for companies and research institutions. Its creators, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, released the system free to the public along with a source-code license, and handed it in particular to many universities for teaching.

But AT&T later took the Version 7 Unix source code private and barred universities from using it.

To keep teaching computer science without touching AT&T's new Unix source code, the Amsterdam professor Andrew Tanenbaum built the MINIX operating system.

MINIX was what Torvalds installed on his own computer. It cost him about US$169, and he waited a month for the installation disks to arrive. MINIX couldn't be used commercially: Tanenbaum had meant it as a teaching aid, so he deliberately held some of its features back.

Torvalds wanted a freer operating system, one that placed fewer limits on programmers.

"I initially just wanted to write an operating system that could replace MINIX. It didn't have to be much better than MINIX — as long as it could do a few extra small things beyond what MINIX already did, I'd be satisfied," Torvalds said, recalling his plan.

After nearly two months of writing code, Torvalds had an operating system full of holes but barely usable. Privately he called it Linux — his own name, Linus, plus the X that stood for Unix. Then he posted the MINIX newsgroup thread quoted at the top of this article. It drew replies from plenty of operating-system enthusiasts. Some asked him to explain more; others offered to test the system.

On September 17, 1991, Torvalds uploaded the first version of Linux to an FTP directory and opened its source code, so that anyone interested could modify and use it.

The first version of Linux was numbered 0.01 — in Torvalds' own words, "to show that this was still a very immature operating system."

When Linux 0.12 came out in February 1992, Torvalds adopted a new copyright notice under the GPL license. The GPL gives users the right to obtain the source code when they obtain a program, but it says nothing about whether passing the program on has to be free. So in theory, if someone is willing to buy your program, you can ask a million dollars for it — you just have to hand over the matching source code.

Linux began drawing attention within a few years of its release, but Torvalds had no intention of selling the system, or of losing control of it. He stuck with open source, hoping that under the GPL people would join in and take part in upgrading the Linux kernel.

In Under a Decade, the Torvalds-Gates Conflict Shifted From Ideology to Business Models

"Once upon a time, men were men and wrote their own device drivers. Do you long for those days? — Linux 0.02 release announcement"

In Torvalds' own words, only three things in his world give life meaning: first, survival; second, social order; and third, entertainment. Linux is his entertainment.

From the moment each started his own project, Torvalds and Bill Gates wanted different things. Before and after he became famous, Torvalds made no secret of his distaste for the endless expansion of copyright.

Gates was the opposite. What first made him famous in the American tech world was an open letter he sent to early computer hobbyists in 1976, calling the copying of software theft.

Gates, who had dropped out of college just two years earlier, wrote:

"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distribute it for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software."

In 1991, no one would have compared a Finnish student's side project with Gates' Microsoft empire.

By the time Linux was born, Microsoft's Windows already held more than 80% of the market, and the company's annual sales had just passed $1 billion for the first time. Four years later, Gates' personal fortune reached $12.9 billion, making him the youngest person ever to become the world's richest man.

Personal computers were spreading across the United States around then. Compaq and HP, the big computer makers, and Dell, only just starting out — every computer they sold ran Microsoft's operating system and office software.

Office's three main applications — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — were each climbing fast. Around 1994 all three passed 50% market share; by 1998 they were near 100%.

Having taken the desktop and the consumer PC market, Microsoft set its sights on the server business inside companies. It poached an experienced software team from DEC, once a minicomputer giant, to build the server version of Windows — Windows NT.

Microsoft started developing Windows NT in 1988 and put it on sale in 1993.

But this time, Windows did not sweep the enterprise business the way it had swept the PC market in its early years.

The volunteer developers Linux had gathered wrote a faster, better system. Staying open meant Torvalds himself could make no money from people using the operating system, but it brought more people in to improve it.

The rise of the internet sped this up: the newest Linux code could now travel around the world much faster. Enthusiasts no longer had to wait a month for disks in the mail before they could install, debug, and compile, the way Torvalds had with MINIX in 1990.

Along the way came commercial companies like Red Hat, which sold enterprise versions of Linux and made money by giving companies technical support and training. Today Red Hat's market value has reached $14 billion.

As Linux won more and more of the server market, established tech companies like IBM and Sun backed it more heavily.

IBM joined the Linux server camp in 1998, and in 2001 announced it would invest $1 billion in Linux development.

Sun joined Linux the same year. Oracle followed, saying its database already had some Linux-facing interfaces and that it would move the database from Unix to Linux over time.

That drew Wall Street to companies in the field and gave rise to a wave of Linux stocks. Andover.net, which provided website services, saw its share price quadruple on IPO day; Corel Corporation, which made a Linux version of the WordPerfect office suite, saw its stock more than triple on its listing day. The fastest riser was VA Linux — a company still losing money — which sold shares at $30 in its IPO and closed its first trading day above $240.

TheStreet, a financial news site covering Wall Street, even teamed up with Red Hat's Wide Open News to bring Linux news to investors.

Linux Never Won the Desktop War

After 1996, Linux's user base reached 3.5 million.

The open-source community was once very optimistic about taking the desktop. Programmers who believed open source was bound to win compared Gates to a Nazi, mocking how autocratic and closed he was in desktop operating systems.

To beat Windows, a good number of programmers threw themselves into desktop versions, trying to build a prettier Linux interface that felt better to use. GNOME and KDE were the two best-known graphical interfaces.

Torvalds himself once thought Linux on the desktop had a shot at challenging Microsoft.

Steve Jobs once invited Torvalds to Apple's headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop, hoping the man who made Linux would join Apple and help develop the Unix-based Mac OS. Torvalds had no interest at all:

"If I hadn't wanted to learn about this new Mac OS X system, I would have made an excuse and left long before it ended."

Few people turn down an invitation from Jobs. Torvalds did. Jobs kept stressing that the Mach kernel under Mac OS was open source, but to Torvalds that sounded like a cover: even if the kernel underneath was open, the Mac OS built on it was not, which made the whole point meaningless.

Torvalds recalled that when he met Jobs he was still optimistic that Linux would one day take a share of the desktop market, even though that had never been his goal.

But next to Windows, Linux had no graphical interface that was both easy to use and good to look at, no games or multimedia support, and above all no office software to match Office.

In the end, everything the Linux community poured in never made the open-source system replace Windows on office desks and on the computers in people's studies.

"As of 2000, Linux's desktop market share was still just 1.5%, while Microsoft's Windows had already passed 90%. Dell killed off its Linux laptop and desktop lines," wrote a 2001 article in Wired. Its author, Russ Mitchell, had been editor-in-chief of Wide Open News before being laid off in a cost-cutting round.

When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the share prices of a great many Linux companies fell to the floor.

As Jobs put it after returning to Apple in 1997: "The desktop wars are over. Microsoft won them."

But Microsoft Lost the Internet

Up to this point, things had gone the way Microsoft expected years earlier.

In 1998, the Microsoft engineer Vinod Valloppillil wrote a series of internal memos for senior vice president Paul Maritz, sketching out preliminary strategies for dealing with open-source software.

In October 1998 the memos were leaked to Eric Raymond, maintainer of The New Hacker's Dictionary. Because the leak fell near Halloween, the documents came to be known together as the "Halloween documents."

Valloppillil wrote that Linux could not threaten Windows' share of desktop computers, but that it would threaten Microsoft's Windows NT server operating system. He gave four reasons:

• Linux asks less of a machine's hardware;
• because Linux descends from Unix, the cost of switching systems is lower;
• Linux's scalability, interoperability, usability, and manageability are all better;
• as long as services and protocols are generic enough, Linux has a chance to win.

The fourth point was also the most important. Valloppillil laid out countermeasures too:

• One was the traditional route of using marketing channels to run down Linux's reliability and security — that had little effect.
• The other was to "attack Linux's home base, the generic network and server infrastructure."

The documents argued that if Microsoft got network protocols into its own hands, replaced open protocols with Microsoft-led ones, and raised the barrier to entry, it could beat Linux.

Bit by bit, the war between Windows and Linux became a system controlled by Microsoft against an open one.

That is not far from how Torvalds saw Gates: "We have nothing in common. The one field in the world he's best at is one I have no interest in at all. I have nothing to say about his business, and he has nothing to offer on my technology."

One thing turned out well for Linux and for the whole internet industry: openness won.

Linux and the open-source software around it became the first choice for people building websites and internet services. For a long stretch, the favorite technology stack for websites was LAMP — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

The Two Companies That Sealed Linux's Victory Over Windows: Google and Amazon

In 2003, Andy Rubin — who had started several companies and sold his own mobile company to Microsoft — founded a new one: Android.

It was an ambitious plan: Rubin wanted Android to become the universal operating system for phones. He first went to Samsung about working together, and an executive there mocked him to his face: "Are you insane?"

But in 2005 Google announced it was buying Android, and had Rubin build a team inside the company to push the phone operating system forward. The first Android phone reached the market in 2008, and in less than four years Android became the most-used operating system in the world.

Building an operating system is hard. The iPhone may have looked as if it appeared out of nowhere in 2007, but the kernel it ran on goes back to NeXT, the company Jobs started after leaving Apple in 1985.

By the time the iPhone launched, its kernel had been in development for nearly two decades, and the iPhone itself had taken three years.

With Linux underneath, Android had no need to worry about the most basic layer. Rubin, leading a team far behind Apple's in both experience and size, got an Android phone onto store counters within five years.

As of the second quarter of this year, Android's market share had reached 86% — of every 100 smartphones sold, 86 were Android, 12.9 were iPhones … and fewer than one was a Windows Phone.

If Android and the iPhone killed Windows Phone and cut Windows off from ordinary consumers, it was Amazon that helped Linux take the enterprise market outright.

On August 25, 2006 — exactly 15 years after Torvalds announced the birth of Linux — Amazon, a company that had always focused on selling things online, released a product with nothing to do with its main business: EC2, part of AWS (Amazon Web Services).

The project was run by Andy Jassy, a close lieutenant of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and had been in quiet development for more than two years.

AWS is what we now call cloud computing, and EC2 is one of its most basic services. Put simply, EC2 lets a company set up a server online. If its performance needs are modest, the first year is free; after that, as demand grows, the company pays by usage and time.

One foundation of AWS's success was the wide range of free Linux distributions. AWS could run Windows too, but only Linux let you start a server truly for free.

Startups took to EC2 first, and it arrived just as smartphones and the startup boom did. Amazon followed with one supporting service after another.

Two years after AWS went live, Microsoft began testing its counterattack: Windows Azure.

Just as in its earlier fight with Linux, Microsoft kept users inside its own services rather than offering the open, pick-any-technology approach of Amazon AWS — developing for Windows Azure meant a full set of Microsoft tools and standards.

In the cloud computing business, AWS — backed by Linux and a pile of open standards — won again.

According to a recent Gartner report, Amazon AWS leads the cloud services market with a 31% share; second-place Microsoft holds less than a third of that.

In the End, Even Microsoft Started Supporting Linux

Losing cloud computing was the open world's last blow to Windows.

Satya Nadella, an executive of Indian descent, took over the cloud computing business in 2011. One change he made was to let Azure support developers using Linux, to draw users who didn't want Windows to Microsoft's cloud computing service.

That move briefly put Microsoft at No. 17 among the companies contributing to Linux, because Microsoft put a lot of people to work on Linux so it would support the Azure platform.

In 2013, Nadella succeeded Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO. His love for Linux only deepened:

In 2014, Nadella called cloud computing the strategic core of Microsoft, and stopped stressing the value of the operating system.

That same year, Windows Azure was renamed Microsoft Azure and went further in supporting all sorts of open standards and services, Linux among them.

Linux Won. Torvalds' Life Barely Changed.

Twenty-five years after Linux was born, Microsoft, once the ruler of the computer industry, is no longer the most important tech company — Apple and Google are both worth more.

Under Nadella, Microsoft now concentrates on providing productivity applications and internet services to other companies, and no longer clings to controlling operating systems and internet protocols itself.

Gates, who once led Microsoft in beating down one rival after another, has become a philanthropist and gives Microsoft only a sliver of his attention.

And Linux, which started out on the backs of volunteer developers, stopped running on programmers' enthusiasm long ago. Most of the developers contributing to it now are paid by vendors, and the vendors take knowledge from the open-source community to improve their own commercial software — a virtuous circle.

Google and Amazon, which helped Linux beat Windows for good, have done well out of it too. Today, advertising and app store revenue on phones is Google's main source of growth.

And Amazon's market value has grown by more than $100 billion over the past year, largely thanks to the strong showing of its AWS cloud computing business.

Today the personal net worth of Bezos and the two Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, stands at $66.7 billion, $40.3 billion, and $39.2 billion — fourth, eleventh, and twelfth in the world.

Red Hat, the listed company built on Linux, has joined the S&P 500, with annual profit of $350 million.

But Torvalds, the man who created Linux, lives much as he did before, driving a car with the license plate "DAD OF 3." The fireplace mantel at home is covered with his favorite penguin figurines — the Linux mascot.

Torvalds is proud of Linux. He has said: "There's no such thing as an official version of the Linux project. There's only my version and everyone else's."

But he has never made much money from it.

There have been rumors that Torvalds draws a $10 million salary from the Linux Foundation every year, but there is little behind the claim.

Torvalds denied it on his personal Google+ two years ago: "Clearly I don't google myself enough."

He says the only real money he ever got from Linux was the stock options Red Hat gave him. (Plenty of other Linux companies gave him options too, but the bubble soon left them worthless.)

Before Red Hat went public, though, Torvalds never read what the agreement it handed him actually said. He asked a stockbroker later and learned the options were worth about $500,000.

By the time they were worth $1 million, Torvalds sounded like an ordinary person who had just hit the jackpot: "Frankly, I was excited out of my mind."

More than 20 years on, what Torvalds cares about has not changed much from the early days.

At a panel discussion in Helsinki in 2012, Torvalds, then 43, brought up the trouble Nvidia's graphics drivers caused Linux. The more he said, the angrier he got, until he raised his middle finger at the camera and said, "So, Nvidia, fuck you!"

He really hasn't changed at all.

Cover image via glen1794@deviantart, freeCodeCamp, Softpedia