Linux the operating system of the Future
Jamil Khatib
Linux is a freely available Operating System. Currently, it is considered as the most increasing popularity Operating System for lot of platforms starting from PCs and up to workstations and enterprise servers. Moreover, it is an Open-Source Operating System.
Linux was started as a small operating system kernel written by a university student in Finland in 1991. Linus Trovals the creator of Linux , wrote his kernel from scratch based on a hacked code of minix operating system and made it a UNIX-like operating system not for main frame or mini computer platforms but for his desktop PC.
Linus gave the source of his OS away for the public. Later, the hackers start studying, improving, and developing applications for it.
Students and researches found it as a good material for study and experiments. This is because they can access its source file and modify it for their need.
Since then, it started taking place for the server and network side.
Currently, with the lot of applications developed for it, it took some share on the desktop computers.
lately, Companies start considering it as one of their major future development platform due to its large popularity which is according to some statistics more than 7 million users are running Linux .
Linux is a free UNIX-like operating system written from scratch and inherited more than 20 years of UNIX development and research. It gains ease of porting lot of UNIX applications to it.
Linux is stable and has fewer reported bugs than anyone. Not this only but all bugs are documented and find its way to so be solved by some Linux hackers. On the other hand, MS operating systems have the most reported bugs and more unreported. This appears from the lot of published service packs and patches. Any bug should be solved by patch from Microsoft.
the stability of Linux is a result of the availability of source code so anyone can modify bugs and return the patch to the Linux community. Linux has the largest beta testers around the world more than any other Operating system.
For example, Linux 1.2.13 kernel systems on the Internet are still running without a reboot since they were installed.
Linux is a very power-full multi-user and multi-tasking operating system. Large number of servers on Internet that runs it is very good prove of that.
It supports SMP ``Symmetric Multi-Processing'' since 1.3.x kernel.
Linux has lot of kernels that support different hardware platforms starting from x86 PCs, Sparc, Alpha, SGI, PowerPC and I64 in the near future. It has also supports large number of hardware devices such as Network cards, SCSI adapters, sound cards and even RAID systems.
Linux has large number of application written by open-source developer and even by commercial companies such as corel, oracle, netscape, sun, SGI and more.
Lately, KDE and GNOME becomes most popular GUI window managers that are based on the X window systems. These windows managers has good window look and applications that may compete commercial GUI OSs (e.g. windows and Mac) and window managers (e.g. CDE openwindow).
Linux is fully customizable more than any other OS. This is because of the availability of the source code and anyone can modify it for his special needs.
Yes Linux has no firm support like support on any company, but it has a large community of developers more than any other OS. This large community can be contacted by mailing lists news groups or emails and they are more than welcomed to give any help. Also Linux has very large number of documentation, HowTos and books around the Internet.
Some companies like RedHat offer some kind of support for their Linux distribution.
Linux can be considered the most secure operating system not like the NT that has alway security bugs. MS and all commercial UNIX are trying to keep quiet about their security problems, while linux developers always publish security holes with their patches. If any IT manager found a security hole he can fix it because e already has the code.
Linux is a philosophy as much as phenomena. This means that Linux more than a operating system, it is a development and market methodology. This is because of the open-source design methodology that provides the users of the software large good performance, highly customizable software at very low price ``nothing''.
This methodology become the largest threat to MS and companies That follow the same monopoly strategy. This is because they are not competing companies that can be dominated or defeated by any of their strategies, but they are competing group of developers around the world communicating and developing software using the Internet resources.
These developers are sometimes competing the MS-Domination on the OS market. Non-US people and companies are competing the US-Domination on the whole software industry.
How can companies make money of open-source software such as Linux ?
Open-Source business can be divided into two models
- Software distribution.
Anyone can gain money from open-source software by collecting it, customize it for some features or platforms and then sell the collection.In this way he will not violate the Open-Source ``not free'' software concept. This is because he distribute the software with its source and get money for his work on the customization, the storage media, the delivery and the supporting written materials.
For example Red Hat's annual revenues exceed $10 million from selling the Red Hat Linux distribution.
- Applications based on open-source ones.
This means that companies can develop its proprietary products that add value to open source and then sell these products to the commercial community.
IBM for example joined the apache ``Open-Source web server'' group and made it the core of its webSphers product line.
Due to the increasing popularity of Linux some companies start thinking about supporting it and port their products to it.
The Future of Linux in my opinion is in the e-Business and e-Commerce industries. This is because of its low ``free'' price that will lower the over all system cost.
Some e-Commerce leaders now uses some open source software to develop its system. (e.g. amazon.com uses the perl language for developing its site )
- 1.
- Six lies about Linux by Aron Hsiao from Focus on Linux.
- 2.
- Opensource Halloween III document.
- 3.
- The Open-Source Revolution by Tim O'Reilly
- 4.
- spirit of Open Source from ``why Linux''?
- 5.
- from Oracle for Linux site
- 6.
- from Corel & Linux site ``Why Linux ''
Linux the operating system of the Future
This document was generated using the
LaTeX2HTML translator Version 98.1 release (February 19th, 1998)
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Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -split 1 linux.tex.
The translation was initiated by Jamil Khatib on 1999-08-24
Jamil Khatib
1999-08-24
