Linux history. Part III: new markets and old "enemies"
We remembered the first commercial Linux distributions that came out in the 90s. Now is the time of the 2000s - the period when this OS began to conquer consumer markets.
/ Flickr / Liam Quinn / CC BY-SA
Ten to twenty years ago, Linux’s share in the PC operating system market was rather low — less than 2%. One of the reasons for this was the lack of a familiar desktop environment. The situation began to change with the advent of KDE and GNOME. They are still the most popular desktop environments for Linux. These two products became one of the first signals for the birth of the distribution for the consumer market. And he did not keep himself waiting.
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In 2004, Ubuntu 4.10 was released, built on the Debian architecture. The project is obliged by its appearance to the entrepreneur and developer Mark Shuttleworth.
Mark, while working on Debian, saw a number of flaws in it that did not fit into his understanding of the ideal OS. Shuttleworth believed that it was necessary to change the approach to the update cycle and focus on the availability of the product. As a result, he and several colleagues decided to found Canonical and start developing their own distribution.
The open-sourced community warmly welcomed the new system with a stable update schedule - twice a year. Three years after the OS appeared, it became the most popular desktop Linux distribution. Users chose Ubuntu for ease of installation and security. Over the years, we can say that the idea of Mark Shuttleworth about creating a user-friendly and understandable Linux-product came to life.
As often happened in the history of open source software, soon after the release of the first version of Ubuntu, the idea of an improved alternative appeared. This idea in 2006 was guided by Clement Lefebvre, the creator of the Linux Mint distribution. The first version of its OS was based on Kubuntu, but from v2.0 the developers switched to Ubuntu. From that moment on, Mint drew more and more ideas from its predecessor, and after two years the update cycle was finally tied to Ubuntu releases.
The popularity and convenience of Ubuntu in the mid-2000s was noticed at Dell. Back in 1998, the company became the first major manufacturer to offer Linux on the entire line of its products. However, the open-source operating system support program at Dell lasted only a few years. An indirect reason for the closure was called the "lack of demand."
In 2007, the project was resumed with the release of PCs and laptops based on Ubuntu. Not the last role in this was played by the fact that Michael Dell himself used the distribution kit and appreciated its convenience. He contacted Canonical, and the company began preparing software for Dell computers. Computers preloaded with Ubuntu were sold in the US, UK, France and Germany.
This signal was responded to by Asus. The company released in 2007 the Asus Eee netbook. Its main feature was the pre-installed Linux system. The choice in favor of an open source OS allowed the manufacturer to significantly reduce the price of the device and attract the attention of the community.
The community response, however, was ambiguous due to the Asus distribution chosen - Xandros. The OS was a commercial product of a company of the same name that did not fully comply with the principles of free software. Soon came the first Asus Eee based on Windows XP. Microsoft significantly reduced license fees for manufacturers and secured a place in the new niche. After that, Linux began to lose its share of the new market.
But the collapse did not happen. This is partly due to the release of Google's Chrome OS in 2009. The new OS has become the basis for another Linux-device - Chromebook. Linus Torvalds once said that the release of this laptop could be a turning point for the future of Linux on the PC. Four years later, sales of these devices surpassed Apple Mac sales in the United States. But we'll talk about this in the next article.
/ Flickr / ravas51 / CC BY-SA
A number of mobile operating systems was based on Linux. For example, Nokia's Maemo OS, released in 2005, was based on Debian and borrowed most of the GUI elements and libraries from GNOME. In 2004, the developer of one of the first ever mobile operating systems in history - Palm OS - transferred its OS to the Linux kernel. From this initiative, two independent projects were born - Access Linux Platform (ALP) and Palm webOS. The first has not received distribution, and several mobile devices from Palm and other manufacturers have come out based on webOS.
More important events for the Linux-community in the same years occurred in a completely different niche. Android Inc. was founded in California in 2003. A year after launch, the team began to look for investors. The product on the basis of which the company originally built its strategy was the operating system for digital cameras. Not having succeeded in this niche, the team changed focus. This is how the idea of the Android system appeared - rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile, which were the leaders in the mobile OS segment at that time. With the first developments in this direction in 2005, the company bought Google.
Already in 2006, the IT giant introduced the first prototype of a device running a new OS to telecommunications companies. It was a mobile phone with a QWERTY keyboard and no touch screen. In 2007, the media found out that Google’s mobile OS will run on Linux, and the company is already negotiating not only with mobile operators, but also with smartphone makers. The release was to take place soon.
But in the same year, the first iPhone entered the market, because of what Google had to urgently add a touch screen to its phone and postpone the release date. Finally, in 2008, together with the mobile operator T-Mobile, Google introduced the T-Mobile G1 or HTC Dream, the first Android-based smartphone. The demand for G1 at the start exceeded forecasts , and its release marked the beginning of the history of the most popular mobile OS in the world. Dozens of Android versions and thousands of smartphones have made Linux the leader in this niche.
In addition to the release of new distributions in the Linux community in the 2000s, there were other important events.
For a long time, kernel developers did not use code management systems, which made it difficult to support such a large-scale project as Linux. Therefore, in 2002, Linus Torvalds decided to switch to BitKeeper. Although the software was a commercial product, Linux developers were able to use it for free. Despite this, the community found the decision to choose an SCM system controversial.
An ecosystem of open projects has also developed. Events, the release of non-commercial products, licensing activities - around these activities since the beginning of the 90s, more and more new organizations have been created. One of them later became a consortium of the Linux Foundation.
The prototype of the organization was formed on the basis of the non-profit organization LI. In 2000, there were problems with LI management, and the company was renamed Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). In 2003, Linus Torvalds officially became a member of OSDL. The consortium includes companies such as HP, Intel, IBM. Four years later, OSDL merged with another non-profit organization, the Free Standards Group. From this alliance, the Linux Foundation was formed, which is still engaged in financing open-source projects and their standardization.
/ Flickr / victor bergmann / cc by-nd
New century brought new challenges for Linux. In 2003, the company SCO Group, which owned Unix, said that Linux and other distributions illegally use the code of the original OS, which violates copyright. None of the ships initiated by SCO ended up in favor of the applicant.
At the same time, Microsoft launched the Get the Facts campaign, which openly compared Linux and server versions of Windows (of course, in favor of the latter). Microsoft's activity was probably related to the growing share of Linux in the corporate sector. In 2004, Unix and Linux occupied almost a third of this market, which seriously threatened the position of the IT giant.
As part of a new advertising campaign, the corporation claimed that the total cost of ownership of Windows Server 2003 is lower than that of Linux. The open-sighted community strongly refuted these facts. The scale of the virtual dispute has been growing for several years, while Microsoft didn’t roll out the campaign in 2007.
But all this did not prevent Microsoft to work with open-source companies. In 2006, Novell, which owns the rights to the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distribution, announced a collaboration with Microsoft. Equally important, this 13-year-old step could have indirectly impacted Microsoft’s cloud strategy. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was later one of the first distributions available on the corporation's cloud platform.
If you look at the situation more broadly, it turns out that today most of the world’s data centers use an open source OS. In more detail how Linux headed cloud cloud revolution, we will tell in the following article.
/ Flickr / Liam Quinn / CC BY-SA
Consumer step
Ten to twenty years ago, Linux’s share in the PC operating system market was rather low — less than 2%. One of the reasons for this was the lack of a familiar desktop environment. The situation began to change with the advent of KDE and GNOME. They are still the most popular desktop environments for Linux. These two products became one of the first signals for the birth of the distribution for the consumer market. And he did not keep himself waiting.
')
In 2004, Ubuntu 4.10 was released, built on the Debian architecture. The project is obliged by its appearance to the entrepreneur and developer Mark Shuttleworth.
Mark, while working on Debian, saw a number of flaws in it that did not fit into his understanding of the ideal OS. Shuttleworth believed that it was necessary to change the approach to the update cycle and focus on the availability of the product. As a result, he and several colleagues decided to found Canonical and start developing their own distribution.
The open-sourced community warmly welcomed the new system with a stable update schedule - twice a year. Three years after the OS appeared, it became the most popular desktop Linux distribution. Users chose Ubuntu for ease of installation and security. Over the years, we can say that the idea of Mark Shuttleworth about creating a user-friendly and understandable Linux-product came to life.
As often happened in the history of open source software, soon after the release of the first version of Ubuntu, the idea of an improved alternative appeared. This idea in 2006 was guided by Clement Lefebvre, the creator of the Linux Mint distribution. The first version of its OS was based on Kubuntu, but from v2.0 the developers switched to Ubuntu. From that moment on, Mint drew more and more ideas from its predecessor, and after two years the update cycle was finally tied to Ubuntu releases.
A feature of Linux Mint is the support of proprietary software, including plug-ins and codecs for playing multimedia files. Such a move was not typical for Linux distributions - the developer community followed an open model. However, the new approach provided Mint with success - Linux users were finally able to work with familiar Windows applications. Over the past eight years, Mint has been among the three most popular Linux distributions in the history of the kernel.
Battle for the PC market
The popularity and convenience of Ubuntu in the mid-2000s was noticed at Dell. Back in 1998, the company became the first major manufacturer to offer Linux on the entire line of its products. However, the open-source operating system support program at Dell lasted only a few years. An indirect reason for the closure was called the "lack of demand."
In 2007, the project was resumed with the release of PCs and laptops based on Ubuntu. Not the last role in this was played by the fact that Michael Dell himself used the distribution kit and appreciated its convenience. He contacted Canonical, and the company began preparing software for Dell computers. Computers preloaded with Ubuntu were sold in the US, UK, France and Germany.
This signal was responded to by Asus. The company released in 2007 the Asus Eee netbook. Its main feature was the pre-installed Linux system. The choice in favor of an open source OS allowed the manufacturer to significantly reduce the price of the device and attract the attention of the community.
The community response, however, was ambiguous due to the Asus distribution chosen - Xandros. The OS was a commercial product of a company of the same name that did not fully comply with the principles of free software. Soon came the first Asus Eee based on Windows XP. Microsoft significantly reduced license fees for manufacturers and secured a place in the new niche. After that, Linux began to lose its share of the new market.
But the collapse did not happen. This is partly due to the release of Google's Chrome OS in 2009. The new OS has become the basis for another Linux-device - Chromebook. Linus Torvalds once said that the release of this laptop could be a turning point for the future of Linux on the PC. Four years later, sales of these devices surpassed Apple Mac sales in the United States. But we'll talk about this in the next article.
/ Flickr / ravas51 / CC BY-SA
Mobile era
A number of mobile operating systems was based on Linux. For example, Nokia's Maemo OS, released in 2005, was based on Debian and borrowed most of the GUI elements and libraries from GNOME. In 2004, the developer of one of the first ever mobile operating systems in history - Palm OS - transferred its OS to the Linux kernel. From this initiative, two independent projects were born - Access Linux Platform (ALP) and Palm webOS. The first has not received distribution, and several mobile devices from Palm and other manufacturers have come out based on webOS.
More important events for the Linux-community in the same years occurred in a completely different niche. Android Inc. was founded in California in 2003. A year after launch, the team began to look for investors. The product on the basis of which the company originally built its strategy was the operating system for digital cameras. Not having succeeded in this niche, the team changed focus. This is how the idea of the Android system appeared - rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile, which were the leaders in the mobile OS segment at that time. With the first developments in this direction in 2005, the company bought Google.
Already in 2006, the IT giant introduced the first prototype of a device running a new OS to telecommunications companies. It was a mobile phone with a QWERTY keyboard and no touch screen. In 2007, the media found out that Google’s mobile OS will run on Linux, and the company is already negotiating not only with mobile operators, but also with smartphone makers. The release was to take place soon.
But in the same year, the first iPhone entered the market, because of what Google had to urgently add a touch screen to its phone and postpone the release date. Finally, in 2008, together with the mobile operator T-Mobile, Google introduced the T-Mobile G1 or HTC Dream, the first Android-based smartphone. The demand for G1 at the start exceeded forecasts , and its release marked the beginning of the history of the most popular mobile OS in the world. Dozens of Android versions and thousands of smartphones have made Linux the leader in this niche.
Ecosystem development
In addition to the release of new distributions in the Linux community in the 2000s, there were other important events.
For a long time, kernel developers did not use code management systems, which made it difficult to support such a large-scale project as Linux. Therefore, in 2002, Linus Torvalds decided to switch to BitKeeper. Although the software was a commercial product, Linux developers were able to use it for free. Despite this, the community found the decision to choose an SCM system controversial.
In 2003, BitKeeper had an alternative. Linus Torvalds presented his own project to manage the development of a kernel called Git. Today, Git is the most sought-after version control tool among developers.
An ecosystem of open projects has also developed. Events, the release of non-commercial products, licensing activities - around these activities since the beginning of the 90s, more and more new organizations have been created. One of them later became a consortium of the Linux Foundation.
The prototype of the organization was formed on the basis of the non-profit organization LI. In 2000, there were problems with LI management, and the company was renamed Open Source Development Labs (OSDL). In 2003, Linus Torvalds officially became a member of OSDL. The consortium includes companies such as HP, Intel, IBM. Four years later, OSDL merged with another non-profit organization, the Free Standards Group. From this alliance, the Linux Foundation was formed, which is still engaged in financing open-source projects and their standardization.
/ Flickr / victor bergmann / cc by-nd
Old conflicts and new horizons
New century brought new challenges for Linux. In 2003, the company SCO Group, which owned Unix, said that Linux and other distributions illegally use the code of the original OS, which violates copyright. None of the ships initiated by SCO ended up in favor of the applicant.
At the same time, Microsoft launched the Get the Facts campaign, which openly compared Linux and server versions of Windows (of course, in favor of the latter). Microsoft's activity was probably related to the growing share of Linux in the corporate sector. In 2004, Unix and Linux occupied almost a third of this market, which seriously threatened the position of the IT giant.
As part of a new advertising campaign, the corporation claimed that the total cost of ownership of Windows Server 2003 is lower than that of Linux. The open-sighted community strongly refuted these facts. The scale of the virtual dispute has been growing for several years, while Microsoft didn’t roll out the campaign in 2007.
But all this did not prevent Microsoft to work with open-source companies. In 2006, Novell, which owns the rights to the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distribution, announced a collaboration with Microsoft. Equally important, this 13-year-old step could have indirectly impacted Microsoft’s cloud strategy. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was later one of the first distributions available on the corporation's cloud platform.
If you look at the situation more broadly, it turns out that today most of the world’s data centers use an open source OS. In more detail how Linux headed cloud cloud revolution, we will tell in the following article.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/446086/
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