How Linux became the enterprise's bedrock
As Linux turns 30, Brian Exelbierd considers the reason for the open source standard-bearer's success
Last year saw the Linux kernel reach its 30th anniversary. It's been a crazy three decades for Linux, with it having moved from an enthusiast project to seizing a dominant share of the server and enterprise market. Now, Linux is poised to serve as the foundation of the industry's move toward cloud native computing, while simultaneously powering the migration of the enterprise to edge computing architecture.
How did it get to be this way? Why did Linus Torvalds' initial attempt at a homebrew kernel evolve to become such an instrumental piece of infrastructure for the world's computing needs?
It's tempting to do a beat-by-beat retrospective of the history of Linux from 1991 to the present to find out the answers to the above. Instead, I think there are some features implicit in the Linux kernel that address the above, have made it exceptionally well-suited to the enterprise niche, and are also why the future looks bright for Linux OSes in the enterprise. In short: it fits the audience, has successfully abstracted away the fundamentals, and is continually evolving.
Linux fits the audience
You could attribute Linux's popularity among the open source community to network effects: the incentives are for people to gravitate towards one kernel in the open source ecosystem, as this potentiality allows for a greater scope of collaboration. As one of the first movers in open source, Linux was naturally a major focus for the agglomeration of developers and attention.
From the start, Linux was an open source project, with it predating even the use of the term "open source". This meant that the Linux kernel attracted a strong audience of people who like to tinker with their OS and software. Not coincidentally, this was the same group of people who tend to specialise in computing and IT and entered the enterprise workforce.
Enterprise IT teams then found themselves needing complex, scaled, and bespoke infrastructure to meet their business needs. This often ruled out proprietary software, given that many organisations needed to easily access the core of their software stack in order to ensure their infrastructure met organisational needs.
As a result, open source became the best contender available to teams, and Linux's popularity as one of the leading and most feature-complete open source kernels, made it stand out in that field. With many people in enterprise teams having encountered Linux in the computer lab or during their spare time, it became a natural choice to be suggested and then adopted as a piece of enterprise infrastructure.
Linux abstracts away the fundamentals
Why was Linux the open source kernel that ended up being the focus of significant contribution and mass adoption? It's likely that it's because by the turn of the millennium, Linux stood out from its peers for its longevity. The project had attracted a nucleus of contributors and built a structure that supported greater contribution.
The heart of this comes down to how well the Linux project succeeded in achieving the kernel's central task of abstracting away the details of the OS. This allowed teams to focus on the tasks and workflows that add value to their organisation, rather than having to spend time reinventing the wheel for their own deployment.
What's particularly appealing about Linux is how well it generally handles abstraction. Generally, tinkering with underlying components is a sure-fire way to break the entirety of an OS sitting atop it. The Linux kernel, by contrast, is organised in a very robust way and is, in many regards, quite modular. This means that developers often find it much less risky to modify the behaviour of the kernel to extend or add functionality, which allows them to perform a level of "precision surgery" with their infrastructure software. This is a huge draw for enterprise users, given their need for bespoke and complex solutions.
Linux is continually evolving
As mentioned above, Linux is well-established as a project that has a great set of contributors behind it. But Linux is also recognised by industry, with large operating system providers and technology companies supporting contributions by providing infrastructure and employment for contributors. As a result, Linux has managed to address one of the big questions all enterprises have for software in their stack - the question of support.
This level of support also means that, alongside bug fixes and security patches, Linux also benefits from a constant stream of new features and updates that leverage new industry developments and standards.
All the above paints a bright picture for Linux's future. Alongside an enduring audience fit for the enterprise, owing to its open source roots, Linux also remains exceptionally well-suited for the bespoke needs of enterprises, having achieved a critical mass of support. For this reason, Linux is the foundation for complex digital transformation efforts in just about every industry.
Brian Exelbierd is business strategist for communities and developers Red Hat Enterprise Linux at Red Hat