Think of the penguin and you'll think of a funny bird on the ice floes of
Antarctica. While few of those black and white birds actually live there, the
picture isn't far off. They waddle clumsily, often in a long file, for tens of
miles through snowstorms. They're hardy, mature (50 mn years), and their
progress is terribly slow.
Tux the penguin, the colorful mascot of the Linux operating system, matches
his black-and-white counterparts in several ways. Linux is hardy and stable,
mature (15 years is the tech equivalent of 50 mn), and it's made rather slow
progress over these years.
I remember the excitement nearly ten years ago when we put together a Linux
"package" in our labs: download, assemble onto CD-R, tune it for the
486, burn a CDR. From that month in 1996, CyberMedia gave out Linux CDs every
year with one of our publications, and we also used the opportunity to switch
our company's communications and mail server to Linux. That was an old 486, a
former desktop. It later ran for years by itself-often without keyboard or
monitor, or even a UPS.
All this, and free? It seemed evident that Linux would occupy a key place in
the server operating systems world, pushing back other OSs, including
vendor-owned UNIX variants, and Windows. There'd be Linux across the
enterprise, the home, and of course the Internet.
A decade later, Linux probably accounts for between a tenth and a fifth of
server sales. Why not more?
First, systems vendor support came in late. And when it did, the initial
years saw it more as an offering to fill a gap and extend a portfolio. Tuning
and optimization came later. Even today, Sun's Scott McNealy says of partner
Red Hat: "We'll give
we'll tell them that
and features."
Sans history or commercial backing, Linux had no ecosystem around, including
trained engineers. All this kept CIOs wary enough to keep Linux away from most
enterprise apps, but interested enough to experiment with it-usually for
file/print, and mail and Web proxy.
Today, history's repeating on the desktop. It's being bundled with
so-called "Rs 10k PCs" to save the Windows license fees, but without
careful selection, tuning, optimization, often leaving a kludgy mess that makes
for an unusable desktop and a poor aftertaste-and an incorrect user conclusion
that there's something wrong with Linux.
Yet Linux is reportedly inspiring Microsoft, even if open source itself is
not. With Longhorn/Vista getting so complex to develop in the good old ways, the
Linux development model-of creating, testing and certifying a
"kernel" and then allowing libraries, tools, services and apps around
it-is a likely option for future development at Redmond.
I would venture to suggest that the Linux desktop is a lost cause, except
possibly for keeping up some pricing pressure on Microsoft. As a server OS,
though, it remains a great alternative. That's why CIOs are testing the Linux
waters today-as this issue's cover story says.