We continue to recall the history of the development of one of the most significant products in the open source world. In the last article we about the developments that preceded the advent of Linux, and told the story of the birth of the first version of the kernel. This time we will focus on the period of commercialization of this open OS, which began in the 90s.
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The birth of commercial products
Last time we settled on SUSE, which was the first to commercialize a Linux-based OS in 1992. It began releasing products for business customers based on the popular Slackware distribution. Thus, the company has shown that open source development can be done not only for fun, but also for profit.
One of the first to follow this trend was the businessman Bob Young (Bob Young) and the developer Marc Ewing (Marc Ewing) from the United States. In 1993 Bob company called ACC Corporation and started selling products based on open source software. As for Mark, in the early 90s he was just working on a new Linux distribution. Ewing named the Red Hat Linux project after the red hat he wore while working at the computer lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Distribution Beta summer 1994 based on Linux kernel 1.1.18.
Next release of Red Hat Linux in October and was called - Halloween. It differed from the first beta in the presence of documentation and the ability to choose between two kernel versions - 1.0.9 and 1.1.54. After that, updates were released approximately every six months. The development community reacted positively to this update schedule and willingly took part in its testing.
Of course, the popularity of the system did not pass by Bob Young, who hurried to add the product to his catalog. Floppy disks and disks containing early versions of Red Hat Linux sold like hot cakes. After such success, the entrepreneur decided to get to know Mark personally.
The meeting between Young and Ewing resulted in the emergence of Red Hat in 1995. Bob was named its CEO. The first years of the company's existence were difficult. To keep the business afloat, Bob had to funds from credit cards. At some point, the total debt reached $50 thousand. However, the first full release of Red Hat Linux on the 1.2.8 kernel corrected the situation. The profit was colossal, which allowed Bob to pay off the banks.
By the way, it was then that the world saw a well-known , who holds a briefcase in one hand, and holds his red hat with the other.
By 1998, the Red Hat distribution was generating more than $5 million in annual sales revenue. The figure doubled the following year, and the company IPO at several billion dollars.
Active development of the corporate segment
In the mid-90s, when the Red Hat Linux distribution its niche in the market, the company relied on the development of service. Developers a commercial version of the OS that included documentation, additional tools, and a simplified installation process. A little later, in 1997, the company those. support for clients.
In 1998, along with Red Hat, the development of the Linux corporate segment was already Oracle, Informix, Netscape and Core. In the same year, IBM took its first step towards open source solutions - a corporation WebSphere based on the open source Apache web server.
Glyn Moody, author of books on Linux and Linus Torvalds, that it was at this point that IBM embarked on a path that, 20 years later, led it to buy Red Hat for $34 billion. Anyway, since then, IBM has become increasingly closer to the Linux ecosystem and Red Hat in particular. In 1999, the company efforts to work on IBM enterprise systems based on Red Hat Linux.
A year later, Red Hat and IBM came to a new agreement - they to promote and implement the Linux solutions of both companies in enterprises around the world. The agreement covered IBM products such as DB2, WebSphere Application Server, Lotus Domino, and IBM Small Business Pack. In 2000 IBM all their server platforms under Linux. At that time, several resource-intensive projects of the company were already working on the basis of this operating system. Among them was, for example, a supercomputer at the University of New Mexico.
In addition to IBM, Dell began to cooperate with Red Hat in those years. Largely due to this, in 1999 the company the first server with a pre-installed Linux OS. In the late 90s and early 2000s, Red Hat entered into agreements with other corporations - with HP, SAP, Compaq. All this helped Red Hat gain a foothold in the enterprise segment.
The turning point in the history of Red Hat Linux was 2002-2003, when the company renamed its main product Red Hat Enterprise Linux and completely abandoned the free distribution of its distribution. Since then, it has finally refocused on the corporate segment and, in a sense, has become its leader - now companies about a third of the entire server market.
But with all this, Red Hat did not turn away from free software. The company's successor in this area was the Fedora distribution, the first version of which (released in 2003) based on the 2.4.22 Red Hat Linux kernel. Today, Red Hat strongly supports the development of Fedora and uses the team's work in their products.
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Start of competition
The first half of this article is almost entirely about Red Hat. But this does not mean that other developments in the Linux ecosystem did not appear in the first decade of the OS. Red Hat largely determined the vector of development of the operating system and many distributions, but even in the corporate segment, the company was not the only player.
In addition to her, SUSE, TurboLinux, Caldera and others worked here, which were also popular and βovergrownβ with a loyal community. And such activities did not go unnoticed by competitors, in particular, Microsoft.
In 1998, Bill Gates made statements trying to downplay Linux. For example, he that "he had never heard from customers about such an operating system."
However, in the same year, in an annual report for the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft Linux is one of its competitors. At the same time, there was a leak of the so-called - Notes from a Microsoft employee analyzing the competitive risks posed by Linux and open source software.
Confirming all Microsoft's fears in 1999, hundreds of Linux users from around the world in one day to corporate offices. They intended to return the money for the Windows system pre-installed on their computers as part of an international campaign - Windows Refund Day. So, users expressed their dissatisfaction with the monopoly of the OS from Microsoft in the PC market.
The unspoken conflict between the IT giant and the Linux community continued to escalate in the early 2000s. At that time Linux more than a quarter of the server market and has consistently increased its share. Against the background of these reports, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was forced to openly recognize Linux as the main competitor in the server market. At about the same time he open OS "cancer" of intellectual property and actually opposed any development with a GPL license.
We are collected OS statistics for the active servers of our clients.
If we talk about individual distributions, Ubuntu remains the most popular among 1cloud customers at 45%, followed by CentOS (28%) and closely behind Debian (26%).
Another front of Microsoft's struggle with the developer community was the release of Lindows OS based on the Linux kernel, the name of which copied Windows. In 2001 Microsoft USA against the OS company, demanding a name change. In response, she tried to invalidate Microsoft's right to one of the English words and derivatives from it. Two years later, this dispute was won by a corporation - the name LindowsOS on Linspire. However, the developers of the open OS made this decision voluntarily in order to avoid claims from Microsoft in other countries where their operating system is distributed.
What about the Linux kernel?
Despite all the confrontations of corporations and harsh statements about free software from the leading managers of large companies, the Linux community continued to develop. Developers have been working on new open source distributions and updating the kernel. Thanks to the spread of the Internet, it has become easier to do this. In 1994, version 1.0.0 of the Linux kernel was released, followed two years later by version 2.0. With each release, the OS supported an increasing number of processors and mainframes.
In the mid-90s, Linux, already popular among developers, developed not only as a technological product, but also as a brand. In 1995 the first Linux Expo and conference to feature well-known speakers in the community, including Mark Ewing. A few years later, the Expo has become one of the largest events in the Linux world.
In 1996, the world first saw the emblem with the famous penguin , which still accompanies Linux products to this day. His programmer and designer Larry Ewing (Larry Ewing) based on stories about a "fierce penguin" who once attacked Linus Torvalds and infected him with a disease called penguinitis.
In the late 90s, one after another, two important products in the history of Linux were released - GNOME and KDE. Thanks to these tools, Unix systems, including Linux, received convenient cross-platform graphical interfaces. The release of these tools can be called one of the first steps towards the mass market. We will talk more about this stage of Linux history in the next part.
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Source: habr.com