The success of Linux comes from the community, not the superior technology

2013, in all respects, is a Linux year. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, announced that Linux has spread to every corner of the computing. Zemlin says Linux is almost ubiquitous from smartphones, tablets, consumer electronics and cars to open clouds and high-performance computers, as well as gaming platforms.

How does Linux spread to every corner of the technology world? After all, Linux has not really fulfilled its original promise to become a traditional desktop operating system that replaces http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/11208.html ">microsoft and Windows." The kernel and the code are just a part of the story, and the ubiquity of Linux comes down to its ability to inspire and condense the community, rather than the superior technology.

Good enough, but there are still some flaws

Having said that, we do not believe that Linux will still achieve today's success if technology lags behind. "Without superior technology, a superior society will not unite around the Linux operating system," says Monica Kumar, head of Oracle's senior executive for Linux, MySQL and virtualization and open source marketing. "This is one of the key components of any successful open source project, the great initial code."

However, this is not enough!

When it was just launched, Linux was a cheap, "good enough" alternative to proprietary UNIX systems. But it has not been done better. In fact, in the more than 10 years since Linux was first developed, InfoWorld still convincingly claims that "as a variant of UNIX, Solaris is a technologically superior operating system compared to a Linux operating system." UNIX, after all, is positioned in a relatively narrow application and hardware type, allowing its vendors to optimize its performance in depth for specific tasks.

As IBM explains, Linux is exactly the opposite:

Reference

The development of GNU is more diverse than that of Unix. Developers come from many different backgrounds and therefore have different experiences and ideas. Within the Linux community, there is no strict set of standard tools, environments, and functions ... because of the lack of standards, there are obvious inconsistencies in Linux.

Interestingly, this also gives Linux the biggest advantage: the ability to apply to all users.

Why the community loves Linux

But why Linux? Considering that when Linux comes out, for most tasks, it's just barely enough to use, what motivates a community to form? Brent Fox, the OEM head of canonical, an Ubuntu Linux manufacturer, argues that the rewards of a public platform are more enticing than the risk of failure.

Reference

@mjasay for a long time, the technology itself is immature. This is appealing to people who are tired of the current OS and attracts a large group of people. --brent Fox (@brentfox) December 19, 2013

These are basically right, but they don't exactly match history. After all, one of Linux's first advocates is a company with a large UNIX business need to protect: IBM. IBM needs Linux to unify its different hardware lines, and sees the potential to build a larger hardware and services business on Linux, even at the expense of some UNIX revenue.

Today, Linux is the heart of many billions of-dollar companies. Like "who writes Linux?" The report reflects that Linus Torvalds's little toy has become the focus of some of the world's largest companies and the best developers.

Advantages gained through diversity, and Linus

The ability to control conflict, and sometimes the ability to control competing interests under a banner, makes Linux so successful. It encourages different companies and individual developers to build Linux to meet their needs. As Jim Jagielski, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, told me, "It's easier to build a kernel than to build a healthy, viable community, because it has a successful community." ”

Top Linux Development Sponsor list:

This diversity is supported by the extraordinary leadership of Linus Torvald. As many people try to privatize Linux, Tovoz has managed to get Linux, supported by his authority, to say "no" to this behavior. It works well but is flexible enough to allow the company to provide drivers or other technologies that make Linux ideal for their customers.

Linux technology has become so magical, however, it is not the biggest advantage of Linux. As Zemlin told me in an e-mail:

These days, I didn't get a lot of questions about Linux, although I used it everywhere. Many companies want to know how to maximize their performance and how to apply its principles to other things. This is the question I am interested in: how the Community works.

Great technology has been created. Most of them, however, failed to find the audience. Linus Torvalds and the development of Linux he developed is the talent of his creation and perfect social development model.