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A powerful, freely available computer operating
system. Linux was created by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, as a
result of his frustration with commercial operating systems such as
Microsoft's windows and Apple's MacOS. Originally based on a
slimmed-down version of the unix operating system, called Minix, Torvalds's
Creation has become an impressive and highly capable operating system in its
own right.
Although Linux was originally the work of Torvalds, the system
has evolved from the efforts of hundreds of programmers working
collaboratively and philanthropically in the open source spirit. The
heart of the system is still written and maintained by Torvalds and a
handful of "generals", who regularly add new features and tweak old ones.
Additions to the system, such as drivers for printers and scanners, are
written and tested by members of the far-flung Linux community, working and
communicating through a number of dedicated newsgroups. Through this
real-world testing and development, Linux has achieved a degree of stability
and usefulness that matches or even exceeds that of commercial operating
systems.
Many isps now use Linux as the basis for their services in
preference to windows or Unix, and it has gained a solid reputation in some
vertical markets such as advanced graphics and image processing. It
is also the operating system of choice for many web servers because of its
robustness and its ability to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous
users, and over 1m websites now run on it. Many people see Linux as a real
alternative to windows in the business community, as the tools for
configuring and administering it become more sophisticated and business
applications become more widely available, especially databases. Most
of the big server hardware companies now sell machines running Linux
alongside their windows-based products.
Most estimates suggest that Linux has a long way to go to catch up
with Microsoft's products, Which dominate the market for personal computers.
But a 2002 survey by idc, a research company, showed that although Microsoft
commands nearly 50% of the market for new operating systems in the business
world, Linux is holding its own at 25%. It predicts that the market for
Linux-based servers will grow by nearly 25% between 2001 and 2006. Proof
that large companies are taking it seriously comes from a 2002 survey by
Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, Which showed that 39% of it
managers in 100 US multinational Companies had deployed Linux in some
capacity. However, critics of Linux still cite its independence as a major
problem for corporate users needing guaranteed technical support and managed
upgrades for business-critical systems. Many versions lack a graphical user
interface (gui) and are considered hard to install and configure. But fully
supported commercial versions with gui front-ends are available from
companies such as Red Hat Software, and because the Linux Source code
is freely available, organisations with sufficient resources can build
custom versions to meet their specific business needs. |
