4 ms·

And yet, if that's what it took to drive corporate adoption of open source software, it was almost certainly worth it... Can you imagine Linux in a world where

And yet, if that's what it took to drive corporate adoption of open source software, it was almost certainly worth it... Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary.

kazinator 7y ago
> Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world. > Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary. Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.
- SEJeff 7y ago
  One of the big breakout moments for Linux was when IBM added SMP support. Before then it was never useful for anything "serious" or commercial generally speaking. Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    I used SMP in 1995, using a 1.3 kernel. Board was an Asus with two 100 MHz Pentiums. I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with. I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM". I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
- api 7y ago
  There's a good chance Google wouldn't exist without it.
  - jraph 7y ago
    Had Linux not existed, the world would possibly run on something based on a BSD kernel today, Google included. Maybe with a GNU userspace, maybe not. And LineageOS would probably have a hard time existing because the manufacturers would not be forced to release their kernels. We might have proprietary kernels optimised for Intel CPUs, too. The FSF might also have decided to continue the development of Hurd, or someone to write improvements to a BSD kernel under a GPL license.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    Not necessarily. Remember, the dot com boom happened before Linux was even a serious contender as a server OS; back then Sun Microsystems was king. Google was founded in '98 and the expense of Sun hardware might have slowed Google's profitability slightly but not enough to matter. We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.
    - kazinator 7y ago
      In 1998, Linux was reliable and performant. It just hadn't made inroads into big corporations to give it pointy-haired-boss cred.
      - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        In 1998, Linux was still behind SunOS/Solaris in maturity and even if it had been even, Intel x86 hardware wasn't remotely on par with what Sun machines could do.
        kazinator 7y ago
        Speaking of Sun machines, in 1997, I was running Red Hat 2 Linux on a Sun SparcStation 20 at Nortel.
        kragen 7y ago
        I was using Linux and Solaris in 1998, and doing things on Solaris was a constant pain compared to doing the same things on Linux. (Sun was still trying to push CDE at that point, for crying out loud.) I compiled KDE and Samba for our Sun and dramatically increased its utility. There were things that Solaris was better at in 1998: big iron things, NUMA things, fault-tolerance things, what we now call "observability". (I still don't have a good equivalent for pstack on Linux!) But Linux was enormously better at many other things, including, most crucially, networking. That was about the time the Top500 list started morphing into a list of the top 500 Beowulfs.
    - loeg 7y ago
      BSD was around, popular, and much more mature than the Linux ecosystem in that early 90s, but was dogged by the BSDi lawsuit. (In fact, SunOS was derived from BSD for most of the 80s, through 1992 or so, when they jumped to AT&T/USL Unix — likely as a result of the lawsuit.) This is arguably the raison d'être of Linux as well[1]: > If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened. [1]: https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html
earenndil 7y ago
BSD was already open-source and superior to linux as the time it came out; it was only hampered by licensing concerns.

kazinator 7y ago

> Can you imagine Linux in a world where companies like Google don't contribute kernel patches? Not only can I imagine, but I lived in that world. > Because I think that would look like a world where all the best OSes were proprietary. Linux was excellent before ... Google even existed.

SEJeff 7y ago
One of the big breakout moments for Linux was when IBM added SMP support. Before then it was never useful for anything "serious" or commercial generally speaking. Linux was a really nice hobby before then.
- kazinator 7y ago
  I used SMP in 1995, using a 1.3 kernel. Board was an Asus with two 100 MHz Pentiums. I saw about a 35% speedup on a "make -j 3" back then; there was a lot of coarse-grained locking still (BKL), and the hardware wasn't good to begin with. I'm pretty sure IBM had nothing to do with Linux; the name that comes up in my mind when I think back to that time is "Alan Cox", not "IBM". I did contract work for infomine.com in 1994; it ran on Linux.
api 7y ago
There's a good chance Google wouldn't exist without it.
- jraph 7y ago
  Had Linux not existed, the world would possibly run on something based on a BSD kernel today, Google included. Maybe with a GNU userspace, maybe not. And LineageOS would probably have a hard time existing because the manufacturers would not be forced to release their kernels. We might have proprietary kernels optimised for Intel CPUs, too. The FSF might also have decided to continue the development of Hurd, or someone to write improvements to a BSD kernel under a GPL license.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  Not necessarily. Remember, the dot com boom happened before Linux was even a serious contender as a server OS; back then Sun Microsystems was king. Google was founded in '98 and the expense of Sun hardware might have slowed Google's profitability slightly but not enough to matter. We might be talking about the Google-Sun duopoly today instead of the Wintel duopoly today had Linux not existed.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    In 1998, Linux was reliable and performant. It just hadn't made inroads into big corporations to give it pointy-haired-boss cred.
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      In 1998, Linux was still behind SunOS/Solaris in maturity and even if it had been even, Intel x86 hardware wasn't remotely on par with what Sun machines could do.
      - kazinator 7y ago
        Speaking of Sun machines, in 1997, I was running Red Hat 2 Linux on a Sun SparcStation 20 at Nortel.
      - kragen 7y ago
        I was using Linux and Solaris in 1998, and doing things on Solaris was a constant pain compared to doing the same things on Linux. (Sun was still trying to push CDE at that point, for crying out loud.) I compiled KDE and Samba for our Sun and dramatically increased its utility. There were things that Solaris was better at in 1998: big iron things, NUMA things, fault-tolerance things, what we now call "observability". (I still don't have a good equivalent for pstack on Linux!) But Linux was enormously better at many other things, including, most crucially, networking. That was about the time the Top500 list started morphing into a list of the top 500 Beowulfs.
  - loeg 7y ago
    BSD was around, popular, and much more mature than the Linux ecosystem in that early 90s, but was dogged by the BSDi lawsuit. (In fact, SunOS was derived from BSD for most of the 80s, through 1992 or so, when they jumped to AT&T/USL Unix — likely as a result of the lawsuit.) This is arguably the raison d'être of Linux as well[1]: > If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened. [1]: https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html

earenndil 7y ago

BSD was already open-source and superior to linux as the time it came out; it was only hampered by licensing concerns.