

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the open source Linux kernel, a milestone that is being celebrated this week at LinuxCon in Vancouver. During the opening keynote presentations at the event, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst took a look back at the success of Linux and its prospects for the future.

Zemlin began his keynote by asking the audience to imagine a world without Linux. The kernel powers stock exchanges, nuclear submarines, consumer electronics devices, and many other systems. Although alternative software could be used in its place, Linux's unique blend of pragmatic leadership, copyleft licensing, and community-driven development have made it a defining force in the software industry.





Zemlin emphasized the important role that the copyleft licensing and underlying philosophical values behind the open source movement have played in advancing Linux. Although corporate adoption has been vital to the kernel's long-term success and enabling the technical sophistication that it enjoys today, he argued that the freedoms that Linux represents have been a powerful sustaining force, ensuring that technical improvements are accessible to everyone.

"Companies come and go. Products come and go. But one thing endures: freedom," Zemlin said. "[Freedom is] important for the last 20 years, and important for the next 100 years."

Whitehurst shared a similar sentiment and suggested that Linux's license and collaborative development ecosystem have opened the door for a lot of innovation that might not have been possible otherwise. It has lowered the costs and accelerated time to market for many companies.

Major software industry figures like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have built much of their technical infrastructure on top of Linux. Whitehurst questions whether these companies would even be able to exist in their current form if open source software had not been available to them. He argued that the higher operating costs of having to bootstrap a website on more expensive proprietary UNIX solutions might have prevented companies like Facebook from being able to adopt free, ad-supported business models.

He also discussed the ways that upstream collaboration and transparent development have benefited the Linux platform and its adopters. Improvements that were made for specific use cases have often proved advantageous for other groups of users. For example, the improvements to real-time Linux that the United States Navy contributed in order to accommodate the technical requirements of a missile-defense system have been equally useful to Wall Street, which relies on Linux to run the New York Stock Exchange.

Linux as a technology is important, he said, but its impact has transcended technology. Whitehurst believes that the Linux community has created a collaborative instrument that can solve some of the world's great problems.

Red Hat, which is expected to generate $1 billion dollars in revenue next year, is arguably one of the strongest enterprise Linux success stories. Although Linux has seen many successes over the past 20 years, it hasn't always fulfilled the hopes and expectations of its most ardent supporters.

Outside of data centers and enterprise server rooms, the platform's status is less rosy. Linux hasn't brought a revolution of openness and collaboration to the mobile industry despite its widespread adoption by commercial consumer electronics companies. Linux has also consistently failed to gain traction on the desktop, even as Apple is finally beginning to make some headway against Microsoft's desktop dominance.

In a moment of self-effacing humor, Zemlin acknowledged that the illusory "year of the Linux desktop" hasn't come yet—despite his annual predictions of its imminent arrival. Ever the optimist, he seemed to be only half-joking when he declared that 2012 will finally be the year when his prediction comes true. References to the "year of the Linux desktop" became a running joke in presentations for the rest of the day.

Linux has come a long way over the past 20 years. It's hard to guess how much further Linux will advance in the years to come, but the platform's optimistic enterprise backers anticipate a bright future. In a closing statement after Whitehurst finished his presentation, Zemlin suggested comparing the changes in Microsoft and Red Hat stock price over the past decade. Red Hat is still dwarfed by Microsoft's size, but the Linux vendor's 500 percent growth certainly looks impressive.

