Happy birthday, Linux

To give you something to compare yourself against consider Pu Yi who by that tender age had been the emperor of China for seven years.

And by the time he reached the end of his first decade Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had been composing original works for four years and had been taken to many European capitals showing off his precocious musical talent.

But Linux could have them all beat, because many believe that the software, which turns 10 this weekend, could be well on the way to starting a revolution.

Finnish start

Linux was written by Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds while studying at the University of Helsinki, and is a version of the Unix operating system created in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

Unix was, and is, popular because it's a powerful piece of software and was intended to be moved relatively easily from one make of computer to another. Many large computer companies such as IBM and Digital Equipment, have translated Unix to run on their machines.

"But," said Alan Cox, one of the guardians of the core, or kernel, of Linux, "most of the old Unix was tied to vendors hardware, and tended to be very expensive."

So Torvalds created Linux to be a cheap, cheerful and compact version of Unix that really could run on lots of different pieces of hardware with very few changes.

Now it works on everything from handhelds such as the Compaq I-paq right up to IBM mainframes and supercomputers. Programs written to run on one machine can easily to be moved to another.

"It's a very powerful, unifying force," said Cox.

This portability is a huge benefit to organisations more used to the bewildering world of Microsoft Windows which comes in many incompatible versions that often struggle to swap documents in different formats let alone actual programs.

Humble start

Linux has developed from those early beginnings into a worldwide industry and movement. Now it is available in many different "distributions" that come with a bewildering array of utilities and programs that have turned it from an engineers tool into something much more useable.

Its emphasis on openness, collaborative development, stability and security have helped it grow in stature and stand in stark contrast to Microsoft's way of doing business.

Linux is starting to find a place in many businesses who are tired of endless price hikes, upgrades, bug fixes and managing the many problems that Microsoft's software can bring.

The organisations turning to Linux also like the fact that there is a vast pool of software engineers out there tinkering with the software and ready to help solve any problems they encounter. It is on this after sales care that the Linux companies tend to compete.