the maldivian linux blog

I was browsing through http://web.archive.org/web/20010428165102/www.inmaldives.com/pages/Articles/ which was a old web site owned by a friend and to whome I too contributed. Found the following artical dated at 06-Oct-2000, I thought I'd publish here. I know its old and kinda long. The funny part here is after 7 years still its the same issues. Same fights, almost the same topic. Its good in a way, I realised we kept up the fight and did not stop. I also noticed things has very much came as predicted before like. I said "Linux will make it to bed rooms", and it has . Finally we have learned too. So if you have time read on, sorry for a lot of mistakes though (as usual).

Computers as we know it as we see today came into existence in the middle of the last century. Since then the speed of development has been faster then any other technology that we know of. It is not only technology that we have seen developing through this, but businesses as well. At the early days computers were not very affordable and there was no need to have them as a house hold product. Those days computers were used for Scientific and Commercial purposes or in other words for large-scale applications. It was in the early 1980�s that computers made it to our homes and offices, with the introduction of machines from companies such as Apple Computers and IBM. gave the name Macintosh (Mac) to there brand of computers. There were others as well, but it was these two companies who made it to the top and at one point IBM clones were introduced and which gave the PC�s a big lead. By then most people have started to realize the importance of computers especially in the business and office environments. As IBM gave the chance to Microsoft a small computer company owned by Bill gates and Paul Alien to develop the Operating System for their PC�s, they got a good opportunity to jump in to the Sean with a good reputation. This was just the Personnel Computer world, we have to remember the fact that these computers were designed for a bigger market which need not have much computing power like controlling mission critical appliance or manage a huge database like of a banking system. The Fact still was that major companies, which have been in the industry since the beginning, were still doing their homework, the introduction of PC�s or Mac�s did not stop them infract they were just babies then compared to what they had then.� The other fact was that they were not developing word processors or paint programs, but they were developing applications for high ending jobs. One other thing was no one predicted the future, maybe they did not know how big a market lies out there then. One example is, IBM giving the rights to Microsoft to sell the Operating System PC-DOS that was developed for IBM by Microsoft.

With the introduction of MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) for the PC�s and growing popularity of PC�s, many software companies saw the market for PC based Applications. They too started developing their applications for the environment. Example Word-Star (which was a very famous word processor), Word Perfect and Lotus-123 (a very popular spread sheet applications). This was all happening in the 80�s. Back then there were no GUI environments for the PC�s, but Apple with the introduction of their popular Operating System Apple II later Mac OS, with the WIMP environment was becoming very popular. At this point there were other applications from Microsoft as well, example MS-Word, MS-Works, but they were not major hits as it is now. With the introduction of Microsoft version of their GUI based environment Windows, which still ran on top of DOS started gaining popularity. Application such as Corel Draw were becoming famous, Microsoft themselves too started porting there applications to the GUI environment of theirs which took the maximum advantage of the environment over other vendors. Soon to crush applications like word star, Lotus-123, with very good marketing approaches. Microsoft designed and changed the way people look at computers, since majority of the world population knows nothing about computers and cannot spend there time learning all the commands how to configure a printer or launch an application, Microsoft made this easy for them. Microsoft introduced ways that made things very much easy for the normal man. Also this was where the market was. But the point here is that no one else saw this market before even if they did like Apple computers, they were never able to sell this products as good as Microsoft did. It is not innovation in technology, but in marketing. Most of the technologies where not invented by Microsoft for example most people agree that the GUI and OOP environments. This came from companies such as XEROX who where more in to R & D. It is very unfortunate that these people who invented and brought the idea up did not get much credit for it. So it is not right for one to say where were these people when Microsoft did it all. If I were to answer that I would say those people made the mistake not to see the money in it, but it was these people who contributed to what we see as it is now. Since Microsoft has enough wealth they have been crushing or buying off their competitors. Obviously this can be a debatable topic.

By early 1990�s Microsoft became the richest company on the planet.� With produced such as there new improved OS like Windos95 / NT. Still the fact is that these products where designed with the common man in mind, it is not the best operating system which was available. Since Microsoft�s target was money, for this they made their products colorful and friendly for the money world not for the technical world.

Soon since PC�s gained a huge popularity mostly because of the dropping in the price of hardware and awareness in the computer world, more and more people stared using PC�s. As a result their arose the need for sophisticated environments, which were more stable and reliable then the environments designed for the PC illiterate person. In the early 1990�s as more and more students got into computer science we started seeing major outstanding projects. Since most universities and colleges work on systems like Unix and other sophisticated environments. It so happens that most who are familiar with these environments after switching to or going back to the PC environment have hard time doing what they want to get done. It is also a very natural thing for the humans to compare between good and bad. As a result there were many people who were working to bring the famous UNIX environment to the affordable PC�s. Since UNIX was the ruling Operating System since it�s introduction in the 1970�s at AT&T. UNIX was used at various projects ranging from Graphical Applications such as the famous SGI systems to mission critical systems at NASA , where Microsoft Windows never made it. So no one can say where was UNIX when Microsoft made their Windows Operating System to every home. Well, as for me my answer would be even before Microsoft made it to the bedrooms, UNIX made it to the moon. Far beyond the reach of Windows.

In a combined effort in the year 1993 a computer student Linus Torvalds from Finland introduced an operating system, as we now know known as Linux. Linus was the one who contributed to the first kernel for Linux soon to be joined by many other programmers, from the Free Software Foundation. Also contributions such as X Windows system from the X Consortium were made. The operating system continued to grow under the dedicated cultivation of a host of other programmers and hackers all over the world, all connected through the Internet. The most unique thing about this operating system is that it is free and all the source code is open to anyone. This gives many advantages over other operating systems developed by companies as such. Since the source code is open anyone who wish can contribute to it and also as soon as they find a bug or an exploit they can fix it and report it. Also since it is a free operating system almost anyone can download or buy it at the cost of the CD and install it on their hardware and test it, as a result compatibility with Linux started to grow. Even though Linux was stared at a PC level it now offers Linux for very high-end machines such as Sun systems and Digital Systems. There is a port of Linux to all most all the hardware appliances. Ranging from Palm Pilots to Super Computers. Infect Linux opened a new approach of developing Super Computers to those who cannot afford one. Since it is the power of processors that gave the power to the Super Computers, people around the world started doing projects using� �off-the-shelf� parts (old 386/486 machines, etc). NASA leads one such project known as the �Beowulf Project�, using Linux as the operating system. Also many other universities have there own Super Computer made by them self through these sorts of approaches. Another major area where Linux is very famous is the server�s side. On the Internet a lot of Web Servers out their run on Linux as the operating system and Open Source projects such as �Apache�. Apache is the most used Web Server in the world. Other more complex areas such as at Boeing and US Post Department all run on Linux and Linux based applications not to mention projects which are done at NASA. A lot of contributions from members of NASA have been also put in this project, examples would be a lot of device drivers for Linux has been developed by a lot of NASA staff.

One area where Linux has been doing poor is at the desktop level for the normal user, since most of the developments for Linux has been done for technical people for technical purposes it has been doing poor on the desktop level for normal users, where Microsoft still stands strong. A good example will be the lack of a friendly user environment, but this is where the money lies and major companies, which develop applications for the end-users, are interested in this area.� It would be a waste to develop applications for an environment where there is not much market, it is true in certain aspects. For example for a normal end-user who uses computers as a stand alone machine to do word processing or to do desktop publishing will not know much technical stuff, so when Linux was introduced it was not designed for this group of users, as other UNIX environments has been. As the user base started to grow and as more and more developers joined the project this weak area has been getting a lot of attention and very powerful desktops environments have been created, example would be GNOME and KDE. Anyone who is familiar with Windows or Mac can easily find their way in and will love the flexibility and the open looks of it. Due to this reason the user base has been growing, it is predicted that the user base of Linux doubles every year. IF you happen to be browsing the Internet it would be a good idea to check on this figures and to check it out your self. Because of this fact many companies such as Corel Computers, Borland and companies like Oracle has ported their applications to Linux and are major supporters of Linux. Companies such as SGI, Corel even have their own distribution of Linux and are strong supporters of Linux. IBM, HP and Dell have started distributing their hardware pre-installed with Linux and gives support to Linux. All this has taken a few years to achieve not bad for free software, which is not owned by anyone. It was in 1998 that most companies announced that they would support Linux and started these projects. It is my prediction that in a near future Linux will gain a lot of support as from the end-users and will make it to the bedrooms as well. It has already made to the machines of the high-end users and it has made it to the space. At this point I would say if Linux was a company it might not have gained much popularity and support as it did or Microsoft would have crushed or bought them off. The obvious result would be we would not have access to advance technologies as we have now if not for idea�s like Linux