Many hands make system work

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

When a 21-year-old computer science student at Helsinki University called Linus Torvalds started work on the Linux operating system in 1991, he had no idea how significant it would become.

"I'm doing a [free] operating system, just a hobby, it won't be big and professional," he told a technical newsgroup.

But Linux, which, like Windows, is a program that enables a computer to run other programs, has become very big indeed.

To some extent, its rise has mirrored the growth of the internet, without which its development would not have been possible.

Torvalds used the internet to issue an open invitation to other programmers to help with his project, and the first working release of Linux in 1994 was the work of thousands of developers, many of whom worked closely together without ever meeting.

Unlike Windows, Linux and the application software that runs under it are distributed under an "open source" model, meaning the original programming code is freely available.

Consequently, the work of an open source developer is subject to the scrutiny of his or her peers, who may suggest or make their own improvements and modifications.

Linux's proponents say this has resulted in an operating system of exceptional reliability, without the security and privacy vulnerabilities which have dogged Microsoft's proprietary operating systems.

Collaboration has also led to rapid and constant development and Linux will now run on a wide array of hardware types. At the same time the original command-line-based interface has been extended by Windows-like graphical user interfaces such as KDE and Gnome, which have broadened Linux's appeal.

Even though Linux source code may be freely copied, open source developers are still able to market their software and, from the late 1990s, several companies have built businesses on repackaging Linux with application software in various "distributions".

These days it is difficult to tell the difference between shrink-wrapped boxed distributions from the likes of Red Hat, Suse and Mandrake, which can cost several hundred dollars, and conventional proprietary software.

Because of the multitude of ways Linux is distributed - the official Linux site lists several sources where it may be downloaded for free - it is difficult to assess how many people are using it.

The Linux Counter (counter.li.org/estimates.php), a website which has tracked the growth of Linux since 1994, estimates 18 million users but it admits this is a guess.

Microsoft, with hundreds of millions of users, may not worry too much about such a number yet. But what may concern Microsoft more is who is using it.

Linux is de rigueur in the computing science departments of many universities and much of the world's internet infrastructure is powered by Linux servers. Some internet service providers wouldn't trust anything else.

Microsoft has won the hearts of consumers and businesses but Linux may already be laying claim to information technology's best brains.

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