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Linus
Torvalds Credit: Steve Double/CAMERA PRESS/REDUX
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By Klint Finley
On August 25, 1991, a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds announced a new project. “I’m doing a (free) operating system,” he wrote on an Internet messaging system, insisting this would just be a hobby.
But it became something bigger. Much bigger.
Today, that open source operating system—Linux—is one of the most important
pieces of computer software in the world. Chances are, you use it every day.
Linux runs every Android phone and tablet on Earth. And even if you’re on an
iPhone or a Mac or a Windows machine, Linux is working behind the scenes,
across the Internet, serving up most of the webpages you view and powering most
of the apps you use. Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Wikipedia—it’s all running on
Linux.
Plus, Linux is now finding its way onto
televisions, thermostats, and even cars. As software creeps into practically
every aspect of our lives, so does the OS designed by Linus Torvalds.
The Idea
But Linus shouldn’t get all the credit. The roots
of this OS stretch back much further than 25 years, all the way back to the creation
of Unix at AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1969. For decades, Unix was the
standard operating system for commercial computing, but there was a catch. It
was owned by AT&T, and it only ran on high-end equipment. Geeks wanted
something they could tinker with on their personal computers.
In 1984, Richard Stallman started working
on GNU, a
Unix-clone that stands, paradoxically, for “GNU’s not Unix.” By 1991, Stallman
and company had successfully rewritten most of Unix, but they were missing one
crucial component: the kernel, which is the fundamental core of an operating
system—the part that talks to the hardware and translates the basic input from your
keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen into something the software can understand. So
Torvalds decided to create a kernel.
Soon, other developers were using the Linux
kernel in combination with GNU and a wide variety of other tools in cobbling
together their own operating systems. Many people still insist on calling these
operating systems “GNU/Linux distributions.” But it’s the kernel that powers
Android and so many other newer pieces of software.
The Web
The rise of Linux mirrors the rise of the web,
which just happens to have started around the same time. It’s hard to pin down exactly how popular Linux
is on the web, but according to a study by W3Techs, Unix
and Unix-like operating systems power about 67 percent of all web servers. At
least half of those run Linux—and probably the vast majority.
Even Microsoft, once the sworn enemy of Linux,
has embraced this open source OS. In 2012, the company announced that it would
let companies run Linux on its cloud computing service, Microsoft Azure.
About one third of
Azure instances are now running Linux instead of Windows. And Microsoft itself
is using Linux for some of the networking tech behind the scenes of
Azure. In fact, Linux is so crucial to web development that Microsoft partnered with Linux vendor Canonical to make it easier for programmers to
build Linux applications on their Windows laptops.
There are a few reasons for all this. The most
obvious is that while Windows Server licenses cost money, most versions of
Linux are free to download and use even for commercial purposes. Beyond that,
Linux is open source, which means anyone can freely modify and redistribute its
source code, tweaking it to better serve their own purposes.
As the web grew, developers tweaked Linux to meet
their needs and released new Linux-based operating systems that bundles all
their favorite web technologies together. Important technologies like the
Apache web server, MySQL database, and the Perl programming language became
staples of every major Linux distribution.
But Linux also got lucky. It wasn’t the only free
operating system of the 1990s, but a legal battle between AT&T and a company called Berkeley Software
Design slowed the growth of some of Linux’s major competitors.
The Great Beyond
For years, Linux remained in the background,
quietly powering web servers for the world’s largest companies, but never
finding much success on personal devices. That changed in 2008, when Google
released Android and it first found its way onto phones. Android can’t run
Linux desktop applications that haven’t been translated to Google’s platform,
but Android’s success has been a huge boon for Linux and the open source
community by finally providing that open source software could work in consumer
applications.
Android now dominates the smartphone market.
According to industry research firm Gartner, the
operating system accounted for about 84 percent of the market during the first
quarter of 2016. But Linux’s reach now extends so much further than
smartphones. You can already find Linux in smart TVs from companies like
Samsung and LG, Nest thermostats, Amazon’s
Kindle e-readers, and drones from companies like 3DR.
Those huge displays in Tesla cars are powered by Linux, and many car companies—including Toyota, Honda, and
Ford—sponsor the Automotive Grade Linux project, which is dedicated to building
software for connected cars. And when self-driving cars finally hit the road,
you can bet they’ll be powered by Linux.
Companies turn to Linux today when they want to
build new technology for the same reason that web developers turned to the
operating system in the 1990s: they can customize it to meet their needs, and
then share (or sell) the results without having to get permission. And it’s all
because a Finnish student decided to share his work with the world. Not bad for
a hobby project.
NEWS POST: The Internet Finally Belongs To Everyone
The United States no longer controls the address book for the Internet.
On Saturday, the US government handed the last vestiges of control to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, an independent organization whose members include myriad governments and corporations as well as individual Internet users. The nearly-20-year-old ICANN was already overseeing the distribution of Internet addresses, and now it officially owns the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, the database that stores all Internet domain names. IANA is what ensures you see the WIRED website when you type “www.wired.com” into your browser.
In recent months, many voices have complained
about this change, including Senator Ted Cruz, a former Republication
presidential candidate, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump,
claiming it would undermine the Internet as we know it. But don’t panic. Very
little will change after Saturday’s handover.
That said, the symbolism of the event is
enormous. The Internet finally belongs to everyone.
Complete Independence
From to 1988 to 1998, IANA was managed entirely
by two people: Jon Postel and Joyce Reynolds. That changed shortly before
Postel’s death, when the Department of Commerce created ICANN and granted it a
contract to manage IANA. The idea was to eventually give ICANN full ownership
of IANA, but politics got in the way. Then, earlier this year, ICANN finally approved a transition plan.
The plan was hailed by industry groups like
the Internet Association, which represents companies like Amazon, Google,
and Facebook, and by non-profit advocacy groups like Public Knowledge and Access Now.
But it was met with instant opposition from certain Republican politicians.
Cruz campaigned against the transition for
months, claiming it would allow China, Iran, and Russia to censor what we in
the US can see on the Internet. Trump weighed in with an ominous press release claiming that President Barack Obama planned to give
control of the Internet to the United Nations. And last week, four red-state
attorneys general launched a failed attempt to block the handover, insisting it
was an unlawful transfer of government property.
On Friday, a judge tossed the case from the
attorneys general, allowing the transition to go through. And now that ICANN owns
IANA, we don’t have to worry about the arguments from Cruz and Trump. After
all, they make no sense.
No More Nonsense
Apparently, Trump was feeding off a recent column from L. Gordon Crovitz, where
former Wall Street Journal publisher argued that ICANN would team up with
the UN in order to keep its antitrust exemption. But as ICANN general counsel
John Jeffrey pointed out,
ICANN has never had an antitrust exemption. In fact, the Department of Commerce
explicitly stated in 1998 that ICANN would be subject to antitrust law.
Nor does the transfer give countries like China
or Russia control over IANA—let alone the entire Internet. Both countries are
part of an existing ICANN committee called the Governmental Advisory Committee,
or GAC. The GAC advises ICANN and can force ICANN’s board to vote on proposals,
but forcing a vote requires a consensus from the GAC, so no one country push
policies without support of the rest of the member states. The board can still
vote down the GAC’s proposals. And because ICANN is based in California, it
still has to follow US law, as do US companies like Verisign that handle domain
name registration under contract of ICANN.
Someone could, in theory, bribe the members of
the ICANN board into taking on particular policy positions. But the board is
elected by outside organizations composed of businesses, non-profits, and
Internet users from around the world. And those organizations can recall
individual board members, or the entire board. This, in theory, provides checks
and balances that keep control of ICANN, and IANA by extension, from falling
into the hands of any one country, company or organization.
Power to the People
That said, ICANN isn’t perfect. Many critics—such
as Internet policy analyst Milton Mueller—have argued that
the board has serious accountability problems and that its election process is
opaque. Some argued
this is reason enough for the US government to keep control of IANA.
But ICANN’s accountability problems predates the
IANA transition, and it’s unlikely that forestalling the transfer would have
made much of a difference. The US government’s only real power over ICANN was
the ability to take control of IANA away from ICANN and give it to another
organization, a “nuclear option” that probably would have caused more problems
than it solved. ICANN reform must come from its member organizations, not from
government pressure.
Ultimately, the transfer of IANA to ICANN is more
of a formality than a real change of policy. But it’s an important formality.
The fact that the US government had the final say over the domain name system
never sat well with the rest of the world, especially after 2013 when Edward
Snowden revealed the scope of US Internet surveillance. Severing that last tie
to the US will allow foreign governments and companies to have confidence that
the Internet is outside of the US’s control.
What’s more, ICANN’s new governance system could
be a model for managing international commons without relying entirely on
governments. In that regard, conservatives, libertarians, and other skeptics of
government power should be encouraged by ICANN’s existence. ICANN might not be
perfect. But it just might be the future.
Originally (STORY 1) and
(STORY 2) in WIRED
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