Linux Learns to Love the Limelight

Linux used to be the alternative: the funky, weird free operating system that grew up on the fringes of the commercial software world, something that hackers and programmers played with in their spare time. No longer: Linux is now big business huge business, in fact, now that publicly held Linux companies like Red Hat and VA Linux measure their market caps in the billions. Will Linux lose its soul?

Linux is one of the great success stories of the 1990s. It was invented by a Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds in 1991 as a scaled-down version of Unix, the standard operating system used in large mainframe computers. Linux caught on fast with programmers: It was fast, efficient and stable, and best of all, it was extensively customizable, so that hackers could modify and rejigger it exactly the way they wanted to. Torvalds' real stroke of genius, though, was to give Linux away for free, and to make its code open to all, so that any hacker anywhere in the world could improve it, add to it, and, when necessary, fix its bugs. MORE>>