Linux turns 29: The biggest events in its history so far

You can argue about Linux's official birthday. Heck, even Linus Torvalds thinks there are four different dates in 1991 which might deserve the honor. Regardless, as Linux turns twenty-nine, here are some of its highlights and lowlights.

1991: This message was sent back on August 25th, 1991 to the Minix Usenet newsgroup. Little did Torvalds know just how wrong he was when he wrote about his new free operating system that it was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu for 386(486) AT clones."

1992: Andrew Tannenbaum, operating system guru and creator of Minix, an educational operating system version of Unix, declares "LINUX is obsolete" and Linux's first operating system war is on. In the resulting discussion, Torvalds makes a very telling comment about his vision for Linux which remains true today, "If the GNU kernel [another attempt to create a free Unix-like operating system] had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now."

1993: There were earlier Linux distributions, such as MCC and Yggdrasil Linux, but Patrick Volkerding's Slackware was the first broadly successful Linux distro and it's still being updated and used today.

1993: Debian Linux, the popular community Linux, gets its start. Today, it's the foundation for Mint, Ubuntu, and many other popular Linux distributions.

1994: Marc Ewing creates Red Hat Linux. Bob Young buys Ewing's company, merges it with his own, and forms Red Hat, the most successful Linux company to date.

1995: Linux has its first trade conference, Linux Expo. Many more will follow. Today, there are over a dozen major regional and national Linux trade shows in the US alone.

1996: KDE, the first major Linux desktop interface, gets its start. Matthias Ettrich started it because he wanted to make an easy-to-use desktop. The K? It stands for "Kool." The name was also a play on Unix's Common Desktop Environment (CDE). 

1996: In the same year, after working with Slackware and Red Hat Linux, SUSE, the top European business Linux, releases its first standalone Linux. SUSE remains a major Linux and cloud power. 

1998: Microsoft starts to target Linux. Eric S. Raymond, an early Linux and open-source leader, reveals the Halloween Documents, which show that Microsoft takes Linux seriously as an enemy and starts to formulate its anti-open-source and Linux campaigns. Over a decade later, Microsoft will change its tune.

1999: Corel releases the first mainstream Linux desktop. While unsuccessful, it would set the path for other popular Linux desktop distributions, such as Ubuntu.

1999: Linux is benchmarked for the first time against Windows NT in file serving. Linux wins. The Linux vs. Windows server operating system wars are on. Linux eventually wins. Today, Linux dominates both the web server and cloud space. 

2000: In this year, IBM announced that it would invest a billion dollars in Linux in 2001. It would prove to be IBM's best investment ever. With this move, IBM also breaks the enterprise market ice for Linux. 

2001: After some delays, Linux 2.4 is released. With this version, Linux becomes competitive with Solaris and other high-end server operating systems.

2003: SCO, formed from the old SCO Unix company and the Caldera Linux business, turns its back on its Linux history and sued IBM and other companies and tried to prove that Linux is a copy of Unix. The company fails, but for years its FUD bedevils Linux's commercial acceptance.

2004: Ubuntu is created. Built on top of Debian Linux, Ubuntu becomes an extremely popular Linux desktop OS and the most important of all cloud Linux distributions.

2004: More than half the world's fastest supercomputers run Linux. By 2017,  all supercomputers are running Linux.

2005: Any doubt about Linux being a major business player is smashed by Linus Torvalds's appearance on the cover of BusinessWeek. The tagline? Linux Inc. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find any major business which isn't running on Linux.

2007: The Open Handset Alliance, which includes Google and numerous hardware vendors, announces Android. It will become the most popular end-user operating system of all as it runs on more than a billion smartphones.

2008: The New York Stock Exchange, soon to be followed by many of the other major stock exchanges of the world, switched to Linux for its core operating system. Linux isn't becoming big business. Linux is big business.

2011: IBM's Watson, running Linux, wins at Jeopardy and sets a new standard for expert systems.

2011: Google introduces the first Chromebook, the CR-48. It runs Gentoo-Linux based ChromeOS. By 2015, Chromebooks are outselling Windows laptops.

2012: IT starts its move from servers and data centers to the cloud and the cloud runs on Linux. By 2019, even on Microsoft Azure, over half of Microsoft's customers' virtual machine (VM) instances are running Linux.

2012: Red Hat becomes the first billion-dollar open-source company. In 2016, it becomes the first two-billion dollar Linux business. 

2014: Maybe the leopard can change its spots? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declares that Microsoft loves Linux. The company proves it by supporting Linux and open-source software both on its cloud and by deploying it internally.

2018: In perhaps its most radical pro-open-source move, Microsoft opened up its entire patent portfolio to the members of the Open Invention Network open-source patent consortium. This is the group which defends all of Linux's patents. 

2019: Microsoft follows up by introducing its own native Linux, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.0, for Windows 10 users. With it, people can run Linux simultaneously with Windows. 

2019: Red Hat is acquired by IBM for $34-billion, making it the biggest software acquisition ever. With this move it becomes clear that Linux now dominates the technology world. Not bad for a hobby!

2020: The global cloud market is now over $100-billion a year. 90% of it runs on Linux. Even on Microsoft Azure, more than half of all VMs are Linux.