Web
As the Web expands, so does Linux. And Redmond may not be able to keep up.
Saturday, July 15th, 2006
When Linus Torvalds began working on the code that would eventually become
Linux, he posted his intentions on Usenet’s
comp.os.minix newsgroup (see
http://www.linux.org/people/linus_post.html). The rest, as it’s said, is (surprisingly recent) history… Via the Internet, additional developers joined the project, sharing expertise, exchanging code, and collaborating on an unprecedented scale. And as the Internet expanded, so did Linux. Today, in a kind of reciprocation, Linux and open source now power a good portion of the Internet. According to some estimates, for example, the
Apache HTTP Web Server has nearly twice as many deployments as Microsoft’s
IIS, and that little Web site called
Google leverages open source operating systems and packages.
Certainly, the Internet remains essential to ongoing Linux development, and the Linux, Apache, MySQL, Pick Your Favorite Language (Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, among others) stack is a powerful foundation for a large variety of applications. But traditional LAMP software — content management systems, shopping carts, and system monitoring dashboards, for instance — are only harbingers. As more and more complex software moves from the desktop to the Web, more and more companies will adopt LAMP as infastructure.
