August 2002

The biggest word in today's Wall Street Journal is "LINUX". Actually, LINUX is tied with UNIX, WINDOWS, CHECKBOOKS, ROCKS and DB2. All are in the headline of a full-page ad by IBM on page B3 -- the first page that accepts advertising -- in the Marketplace section of the newspaper.

This afternoon (I'm writing this in late May) Hewlett-Packard is announcing a deal with Reuters to move that company's Market Data Systems to HP ProLiant servers, running Linux. The deal spans three to five years and could exceed $200 million.

HP says it won that piece of business over IBM and Sun, both of which are also growing Linux providers. IBM has all but embarrassed itself in publicly declaring its love for Linux. The company even got busted for scrawling Linux graffiti on public property. Sun, meanwhile, has been struggling to find a way to be pro-Linux without hurting its high-end Solaris business.

So it would understate the matter to say Linux is a hit with big systems OEMs. But the trend hardly stops there. A year ago Linux was big in just one obvious category: Web servers. Now it's spreading out. HP says its latest sale "demonstrates the growing presence of Linux in the financial services market". This is a market that used to be synonymous with highly proprietary software and hardware. HP pointedly adds, "This also places HP in a strategic position as the financial services market moves from Sun Solaris to Linux."

Proprietary UNIXes aren't the only threatened ones. Earlier this year Microsoft's Steve Ballmer called Linux the "number one threat" to Windows. We'll pause to note that Windows is still a monopoly. But for how long? Several years ago that would be a ridiculous question. Now it's not.

Even where Linux isn't the operating system of choice, it has opened the door for other free and open forms of UNIX, such as BSD, which lives in Apple's OS X. Last week I asked Steve Jobs if it was true that the company's new rack-mounted servers were expected to augment, rather than replace, existing UNIX systems. He said yes. Afer I asked him what other kinds of UNIX crops prevailed in customer service farms, he started his list with Linux.

This is a far cry from 1993, when Phil Hughes included me in an email list that explored opportunities for a free software magazine. After batting ideas around for awhile, Phil suddenly announced that his little company, SSC, was going to start a magazine for Linux, the brainchild of a 21-year-old guy from Finland.

I thought Phil was nuts. But Phil is very instinctive about stuff other people don't see. A few years later, visiting at my house, Phil showed me KDE running office applications that looked remarkably like Windows. Yet everything he showed me was free and open. It blew my mind so much that I took him up on his offer to join the masthead. This was in early '99, when the venture capital was still flowing like Niagra and Linux had an effect on investors that was something like Viagra. By the end of that year, three of the biggest IPOs in the history of Amercican business were for companies strongly identified with Linux: Red Hat, Cobalt, Andover and VA Linux. VA's IPO in December went as over $300 per share on Day One before settling at over $200. For a few months there was no shortage of Linux billionaires.

I recently purged my pile of business cards, and took a picture before tossing the stack into recycling. Not all the companies in the stack were out of business.

Some of the companies were out of business. That was the case with Linux Laptops, Rebel.com, Loki, Eazel and OpenSales, which changed its name to Xelerate (was it one L or two?) before going away.

Other companies, like Kerbango and Cobalt, were bought up by larger companies -- in these cases 3Com and Sun.3Com killed off Kerbango and its cool little radio, while Sun has reportedly done pretty well using Cobalt to hold up the low end of the company's server business.

Others are shifting their focus away from Linux .VA, which was once so identified with the L word that they paid seven figures for the Linux.com domain name, over $1 billion in stock for Andover, and traded on Wall Street as LNUX, has changed their name to VA Software.

Corel, after trying to create a kind of consumer/productivity software business around Linux, jettisoned Linux along with lots of other ballast in an effort just to stay afloat.

LinuxCare is still alive, although without its founders, who are off making news with Sputnik, a new company in the mobile wireless network market.

Other companies, like Boxx, which made (or at least prototyped) a fancy Linux/Windows hybrid laptop, just kind of vanished.

Two related market experiments (which I was very enthused about), CoSource and SourcExchange, quietly folded.

But there are success stories too. Linux-based TiVo is synonymous with the small but closely watched digital video recorder business. Borland, no longer burdened by the forgetable name Inprise (which was on several of my tossed business cards), is reportedly doing very well with Kylix, its cross-platform Linux development environment.

SuSE shrank its operations in the U.S., but remains the leading Linux distribution in Europe and strong world-wide as well. Caldera is holding on pretty well. So is TurboLinux.

The big winner, if we had to name one, is Red Hat. The company still proudly flies the penguin flag, and remains by far the leading Linux distribution. We should modestly point out the name of the editor atop our first issue was none other than Red Hat founder Bob Young. Coincidence?

What's not coincidental is the success of both Linux and the journal that was born to serve it. We've been through the hard times along with the rest of the surviving Linux companies out there. But what's kept us going is the steady march of Linux toward what Linus Torvalds half-jokingly called world domination.

Not every Linux company has been a success; but Linux itself could hardly be more successful. After 100 issues, Linux Journal is now the how-to magazine for countless technologists in the world's lagest technology companies, in nearly all the world's government organizations, in medical and scientific institutions, and in third world economies that need maximum productivity with minimal cost. We're in great shape.

And so is the world Linux now dominates: operating systems.

Linux has successfully done what UNIX devotees have wanted for decades. It has driven the UNIX standard to ubiquity, and commoditized it in the process.

That's one heck of a success story.

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.