Posted on 10/17/2015 10:39:26 AM PDT by ShadowAce
The Linux Foundation recently put up a funny video showing what life might be like without Web search. It's tagline was "A world without Linux is hard to imagine." It also added, "A world without Linux would mean a world without the Internet."
Ah. No.
The Internet actually started as ARPAnet, a government sponsored packet-switching network in September 1969. Linus Torvalds wouldn't be born until December 1969.
The cartoon is really about search on the Web, not the Internet itself. The Web got its start in 1991. It first ran om NeXTStations. These were Steve Job-designed Unix workstations. They're the ancestor of today's Macs. While Tim Berners-Lee was implementing the first Web servers, Torvalds had just announced that he was working on the operating system we now call Linux.
So, with that history lesson behind us, how does The Linux Foundation get off implying the Internet wouldn't exist with Linux?
It's because they're right. The Internet you know, not the pre-Web Internet I cut my teeth on with its archie, elm, and Gopher, which largely ran on BSD Unix, does run on Linux.
Of the top twenty-five websites in the world by Alexa's count, only two aren't running Linux. Those two, live.com and bing.com, both belong to Microsoft. Everyone else, Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, etc., etc., are running Linux.
Looking deeper, Linux's importance to the Web is even more extreme. By W3Cook's analysis of Alexa's data, 96.3 percent of the top 1 million web servers are running Linux. The remainder is split between Windows, 1.9 percent, and FreeBSD, 1.8 percent.
While a great deal of the Internet networking infrastruture runs on Cisco iOS, much of it also runs on Linux-based switch operating systems, such as Cumulus Linux, Big Switch's Switch Light, and VyOS, the open-source fork of Vyatta.
The cartoon focuses on search and we know Google runs on Linux -- and produces Linux-based Android and Chrome OS. But, what about the other search engines? Well, Bing, the number two search engine, runs on Windows Server 2012.
Yahoo, the third ranked search engine, used to run FreeBSD, but Yahoo moved to its own Linux, YLinux, years ago. The other top two English-language search engines, Ask and AOL (yes, really, even now), both run Linux.
Of course, these days more and more people are finding new web pages by using social networks rather than search. By the end of 2014, Shareaholic reported that "Collectively, the top 8 social networks drove 31.24 percent of overall traffic to sites."
Number one? Facebook with, naturally, Linux. Then, in this order, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And, what to they run? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count. It's Linux of course.
In short, the Internet we use today really couldn't exist without Linux.
Why Linux instead of another operating system? Because only Linux combines stability, de facto standardization, high stability and security, and low cost. Ironically, for all the chatter about how "hard" Linux is, it was the perfect operating system to take the Internet from engineers to everyone.
Or, to put it another way: Every Facebook post you make, every YouTube video you watch, every Google search you run, is done on Linux
I’m headed off to work in a few minutes, so will not be able to respond as I’d like.
My Macs operating system is allegedly built over Linux..oddly enough
Let me be the first to say GREAT ARTICLE.
Thank you for your post. Really interesting stuff.
Thanks again.
If I may add, this high level view of things is what people are really lacking on. Seems like people know enough tech to do their jobs and spend the rest of their time gaming or posting selfies.
This ‘connect the dots’ viewpoint is really, really lacking out there.
If I may add, this high level view of things is what people are really lacking on. Seems like people know enough tech to do their jobs and spend the rest of their time gaming or posting selfies.
This ‘connect the dots’ viewpoint is really, really lacking out there.
Could the Internet exist without Cisco and Juniper routers?
Could the Internet exist without fiber optics?
Could the Internet exist without TCP/IP?
Could the Internet exist without DSL and cable DOCSYS modems and infrastructure?
Could the Internet exist without local Ethernet infrastructures?
Could the Internet exist without the HTTP protocol?
Could the Internet exist without browsers?
Could the Internet exist without Apache server software?
Could the Internet exist without people?
Could the Internet exist without [insert your own silly question here]?
What else is there? M$? Don’t make me laugh.
My Macs operating system is allegedly built over Linux..oddly enough
Nope. BSD.
Could the Internet exist without fiber optics? Yes.
Could the Internet exist without TCP/IP? Probably not, unless some other protocol stepped in to take its place.
Could the Internet exist without DSL and cable DOCSYS modems and infrastructure? Yes.
Could the Internet exist without local Ethernet infrastructures? Yes. There are other networking protocols.
Could the Internet exist without the HTTP protocol? Probably not.
Could the Internet exist without browsers? Yes, but not for the technically illiterate.
Could the Internet exist without Apache server software? Yes.
Could the Internet exist without people? Not unless SkyNet developed itself.
Could the Internet exist without [insert your own silly question here]? Agreed. These discussions are pretty pointless.
There’s always UNIX. Which was running switches before Linus came on the scene.
Nope, Darwin (OSX) is a combination of a Mach kernel variant developed by NeXT with major elements borrowed from FreeBSD, which is an open source re-implementation of the Berkly Software Distribution, a major Unix variant from the eighties.
To over-simplify, a 'kernel' is the central part of an OS that handles some of the hardware and low level processes. A kernel may or may not contain the device drivers (OSX does). A lot of the confusion stems from the fact that operating systems like OSX, Linux and FreeBSD are "Unix-like" operating systems as they all retain many UNIX elements that are largely the same. Similarly to how FreeBSD was created, Linux was partly re-engineered from and inspired greatly by MiNIX (mini-UNIX), though Linux deviates quite a bit from MiNIX in key areas.
Depends -- did Al Gore invent Linux?
No your Mac OS10 operating system is not built on Linux its built on UNIX
Sure.
It previously did. For a long time.
No, your Macs are running on UNIX™, of which Linux is a clean room knock off.
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