Unfortunately

Unfortunately. Purchased. This is scrambled to claim a server of their own. Meanwhile, an
unlikely hero arises from amongst the band of open source rebels, Linus Torvalds. Headstrong,
this spectacle releases his Linux system free of charge, Microsoft Reals. And regroups. Ohh,
the nerd in me just loves that. So where were we last time Apple and Microsoft were trading
blows trying to dominate an award over desktop users? By the end of episode one we saw
Microsoft claiming most of the previous soon the entire landscape where they were seismic
upheaval. That's all because of the rise of the Internet. And the army of developers that rose
with it. So the Internet moves the battlefield from PC users in their home offices to giant
business clients with hundreds of servers. This is a huge resource shift. Not only does every
company out there wanting to remain relevant suddenly have to pay for server space and get a
website built. You also have to integrate software to track resources, monitor databases,
etcetera, etcetera. You're going to need a lot of developers to help you with that, at least that
said, you did. In Part 2 of the OS wars, we'll see how that enormous shift in priorities and the
work of a few open source rebels like Linus Torvalds and recruit Stallman managed to strike fear
in the heart of Microsoft and an entire software industry. I'm Sirani Barrick and you're listening to
Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. In each episode, we're bringing new
stories about the people who transform technology from the command line up. OK, imagine for
a second that you're Microsoft in 1991. You're feeling pretty good, right? Pretty confident.
Assure to global domination. Feels nice. You've mastered the art of partnering with other
businesses, but you're so pretty much cutting out the developers, programmers, and those
admins. That the real footsoldiers out there there is this finished geek named Linus Torvalds. He
and his team of open source programmers are starting to put out versions of Linux, this OS
kernel they're duct taping together. If you're Microsoft, frankly you're not too concerned about
Linux, or even about open source in general. But eventually the sheer size of Linux gets so big
that it becomes impossible for Microsoft not to notice. The first version comes out in 1991, and
it's got maybe 10,000 lines of code. A decade later, there'll be 3 million lines of code. And in
case you're wondering, today it's at 20 million. Before moment, let's stay in the early 90s. We're
Next hasn't yet become the behemoth we know now. It's just this strangely viral OS that's
creeping across the planet, and the geeks and hackers of the world are falling in love with it. I
was too young in those early days. I sort of wish I'd been there. I mean, at that time, discovering
Linux was like gaining access to a secret society. Programmers who share the Linux CD set
with friends, the same way other people would share mixed tapes of underground music.
Developer Tristan Ariton tells the story of how he first encountered Linux when he was 16 years
old. Remove any scuba diving holiday in my family. My to her garden which is on the Red Sea.
Beautiful place. Highly recommended. The first day I drink the tap water probably. My mum told
me not to so I was really sick the whole week. Didn't leave the hotel room. All I had with me was
a laptop was a fresh install of Slackware Linux. This thing that I'd heard about and was getting a
try. There were no extra apps. Just what came on that eight CD's? By necessity, all I had to do
with this whole week was to get to grips with this alien system. I read man pages played around
the terminal. I remember not knowing the difference between a single dot meaning the current
directory and two dots meaning the previous rhetoric. I had no clue I must have made so many
mistakes, but slowly over the course of this forcible solitude. I went through the Sparrow and
started to understand and figure out what this command line thing was all about and by the end
of the whole day I hadn't seen the comments, the Nile, or any Egyptian sites, but I had unlocked
one of the wonders of the modern world. I had unlocked demux and the rest is history. You can
hear some variation on that story from a lot of people. Getting access to that Linux command
line was a transformative experience. This thing gave me the source code. I was like that's
amazing. We're out of 2017 Linux developer conference called flock to Fedora very appealing. I
felt like I had you know more control over the system and it just drew me in more and more so
from there I guess after my first Linux kernel compile and. 1995 I was I was hooked the
developers David Cantrell and Joe Brockmeier. I was going through the cheap software and
found a four CD set of Slackware Linux and it sounded really exciting and interesting. So I took
it home and installed it on a second computer. Start playing with it and really got excited about
two things. One was I was excited not to be running Windows and I was excited by the open
source nature of Linux. That access to the command line was in some ways always there. I
mean, decades before open source really took off. There was always a desire to have complete
control, at least among developers. Go way back to a time before the OS wars, before Apple
and Microsoft were fighting over their guys. Their command line heroes then too. Professor Paul
Jones is the director of the online library ibiblio.org. If you worked as a developer during those
early days, the Internet based nature pit that time was less client server totally, and more peerto-peer. We're talking about really some sort of backstop. Facts Some sort of satanic
workstation to scientific workstation. That doesn't mean that client server relationships and
applications weren't there, but it does mean that the original design was to think of how to do
peer-to-peer things, the opposite of what IBM had been doing and which they had dumped.
Criminals that had only enough intelligence to manage the user interface, but not enough
intelligence to actually let you do anything in the terminal authored expose anything to it. As
popular as GUI was becoming among casual users, there was always a pull me opposite
direction. For the engineers and developers before Linux in the 1970s and 80s, that resistance
was there with Emacs and glue. With Stallman Free Software Foundation, certain folks were
always begging for access to the command line. But it was Linux in the 1990s that delivered like
no other. The early lovers of Linux and other open source software were pioneers. I'm standing
on their shoulders. We all are. You're listening to Command Line Heroes and original podcast
from Red Hat. This is Part 2 of the OS Wars rise of lyrics. By 1998, things have changed.
Stephen Von Nichols is a contributing editor at zdnet.com, and he's been writing for decades
about the business side of technology. He describes how Linux slowly became more and more
popular until the number of volunteer contributors was way larger than the number of Microsoft
developers working on Windows. Linux never really run after Microsoft. Stop customer Cell. And
maybe that's why Microsoft ignored them at first. Where Linux did shine was in the server room
when businesses went online. Each one required a unique programming solution for their
needs. Windows NT comes out in 1993, and it's competing with other server operating systems,
but lots of developers are thinking. Why am I going to buy an AI Xbox or large Windows box
when I could set up a cheap Linux based system with Apache? Point is, Linux code started
seeping into just about everything online. Microsoft realizes that Linux, quite to their surprise, is
actually beginning to get some of the business not so much on the desktop, but on business
servers. And as a result of that they start a campaign, what we like to call flood, fear, Uncertainty
and doubt, saying ohh, this Linux stuff, it's really not that good. It's not very. That will liable. You
can't trust it with anything. That soft propaganda style attack goes on for a while. Microsoft
wasn't the only one getting nervous about Linux either. It was really a whole industry versus that
we're new guy. For example, anyone with a steak in Unix was likely to see Linux as a usurper,
famously the SEO. Which have produced a version of Unix wage lawsuits for over a decade to
try and stop the spread of Linux SEO ultimately failed and went bankrupt. Meanwhile, Microsoft
kept searching for their opening. They were a company that needed to make a move. It just
wasn't clear what that move was going to be. Will make Microsoft we're really concerned about
it is the next year in. 2000 IBM will ***** that they will invest a billion dollars in Linux in 2001.
Now IBM is not really in the PC business anymore. They're not out yet, but they're going in that
direction. But what they are doing is they see a Linux as being the future of servers and
mainframe computers. And which, spoiler alert, IBM was correct. Ohh with an ex is going to
dominate the server world. This was no longer just about a bunch of hackers loving their Jedi
like control of the command line. This was about the money side working in Linux's favor in a
major way. Wearing a lot of hats can bog you down. Drive the All One Small Business
Management software can help you. So the thing programmers are getting obsessed with also
happens to be deeply attracted to big business. Some businesses were wary the fun was
having an effect. They heard open source and thought open. That doesn't sound solid. It's going
to be chaotic, full of bugs. But money has a funny way of convincing people to get over their
hangups. Even little businesses, all of which needed websites, were coming on board the cost
of working with a cheap Linux system over some expensive proprietary option. I mean, there
was really no comparison. If you were a shop hiring a pro to build your website, you wanted
them to use Linux. Fast forward a few years, Linux runs everybody's. Website Linux has
conquered the server world. And then along comes the smartphone. Apple and their iPhones
take a sizable share of the market, of course, and Microsoft hope to get in on that. Except,
surprise lyrics was there too, ready and raring to go. Author and journalist James Allworth.
You're suddenly room for a second player, and that could well have been Microsoft, but for the
fact of Android, which was fundamentally based on Linux. And because Android and famously
acquired by Google and now running a majority of the world's smartphones, Google built it On
top of that, they were able to start with a very sophisticated operating system and a cost basis of
0. They managed to pull it off, and it ended up locking Microsoft out of the next generation of
devices, by and large, at least from an operating system perspective. So they were right to be
worried about it. The ground was breaking up big time, and Microsoft was in danger of falling
into the cracks. John Gosman is the chief architect. On the Azure team at Microsoft, he
remembers the confusion that gripped the company at that time. And like a lot of companies,
Microsoft was very concerned about, you know, IP pollution people. They thought that if you,
you know, let developers use open source, they would likely just copy and paste. Get some
code into some product and then some sort of a viral license plate might take effect. That and
there are also very confused. I think, you know, just culturally a lot of companies, Microsoft
included, we're confused on the difference between, you know, what open source development
meant and you know, what the business model was. There was this guy. Idea that open source
meant that you know, all your software was free and people were never gonna pay anything.
Anybody invested in the old proprietary model of software is gonna feel threatened by what's
happening here. And when you threaten an enormous company like Microsoft, yeah, you can
bet they're going to react. It makes sense. They were pushing all that FUD, Fear, Uncertainty
and Doubt at the time. An US versus them attitude was pretty much how business worked. If
they've been any other company, though, they might have kept that old grudge, that old thinking.
But then, in 2013, everything changes. Microsoft's cloud computing service Azure goes online,
and shockingly, it offers Linux virtual machines from day one. Steve Ballmer. The CEO called
Linux a cancer. He's out, and a new, forward thinking CEO, Satya Nadella, has been brought in.
Sacha has a different attitude, he said. Another generation is generation younger than Paul, and
Bill and Steve were had a different perspective on open source. John Gosman again from
Microsoft Azure team. We added Linux support into Azure about four years ago and that was
very pragmatic reasons. If you go to any enterprise customer, you will find that they are not
trying to decide whether to use Windows. Or to use Linux. Or to use.net. Or to use Java. They
made all those decisions a long time ago, about 15, You know, 15 years or so ago there was
some of this argument. But now every company that I've ever seen has a mix of Linux and Java
and Windows and NET. You know SQL Server and Oracle and MySQL proprietary source code
based products and open source code products. And if you're going to operate a cloud and
you're going to allow and enables companies to run their businesses on the cloud, you simply
cannot. Tell them well, you can use this software, but you can't use this software. That's exactly
the philosophy that Satya Nadella adopted in the fall of 2014. He gets up on stage, and he
wants to get across one big fat point. Microsoft loves Linux. He goes on to say that 20% of
Azure is already Linux, and that Microsoft will always have. First class support for Linux distros.
There's not even a whiff of that old antagonism toward open source. To drive the point home,
there's literally a giant sign behind him that reads Microsoft Hearts Linux. Ohh. For some of us
that turnaround was a bit of a shock, but really it shouldn't have been. Here. Steven Levy.
Attacked analyst and author. You know when you're like playing a football game and the the turf
becomes really slick, maybe using switch to a different kind of footwear and in order to play on
that, that my turf and that's what they were doing. You know, they can't deny reality and they're
smart people there. So they had to realize that this is the way the world is and put aside of what
they said earlier. And you know, even though they might be a little embarrassed at their earlier
statements, but it'd be crazy to let their statements how horrible open source was earlier. That
they're smart decisions now. Microsoft swallowed their pride in a big way. You might remember
that Apple, after years of splendid isolation, finally shifted toward a partnership with Microsoft.
Well, now it was a Microsoft turn to do a 180. After years of battling the open source approach,
they were reinventing themselves. It was changed or perish. Stephen Von Nichols company the
size of Microsoft is simply can't compete with the thousands of open source developers out
there working on all these other major projects, including Linux. They were very loath to do so
for a long time. The former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hated Linux with a passion because of
its GPL license. It was like cancer and but once Banner was finally shown the door, the new
Microsoft leadership said this is like trying to order the tide to stop coming in. The tide is going to
keep coming in. We should work with Linux, not against it. Really, one of the big wins in the
history of online tech is the way Microsoft was able to make this pivot when they finally decided
to. Of course, older, ******** Linux supporters were pretty skeptical when. Microsoft showed up
at the open source table. They weren't sure if they can embrace these guys. But as von Nichols
points out, today's Microsoft simply is not your mom and dad's Microsoft. Microsoft 2017 is not
Steve Ballmer's Microsoft. Nor is it Bill Gates, Microsoft. It's an entirely different company with a
very different approach. And you know, and again, once you start using open source, it's now
like you can really pull it back on, or for that matter. Open source has devoured the entire
technology world, people who have never heard of the Linux as such. Don't know it, but every
time they're on Facebook, they're running Linux. Every time you do a Google search, you're
running Linux. Anytime you do anything with your Android phone, you're running Linux again. It
literally is everywhere. And Microsoft can't stop that and thinking that Microsoft can somehow
take it all over. And I I think it's my. So open source supporters might have been worrying about
Microsoft coming in like a wolf from the flock. But the truth is, the very nature of open source
software protects it from total domination. No single company can own Linux and control it in
any specific way. Greg Crow or Hartman is a fellow at the Linux Foundation. Every company
and every individual contributes to Linux of selfish manner. They're doing so because they want
to solve a problem that they have you on, hardware is working, or they want to add new feature
to do something else or want to take a new direction that'll build that they can use for their
product. And that's great because then everybody benefits from that because they're releasing
the code back. So everybody can use it. So it's because of that selfishness that all companies
and all people have everybody benefits. Microsoft has realized that in the coming cloud wars,
fighting Linux would be like going to war with. Well, a cloud. Linux and open source aren't the
enemy, They're the atmosphere. Today, Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation as a Platinum
member. They became the number one contributor to open source on GitHub in September
2017. They even joined the open Source initiative. These days, Microsoft releases a lot of its
code under open licenses. Microsoft John Gossman describes what happened when they open
source NET. At first they didn't really think they'd get much back. We didn't count on
contributions, community. And yet, three years in, over 50% of the contributions to the.net
Framework libraries now are coming from outside of Microsoft. Escorts big pieces of code.
There's a Samsung has contributed art support to dot Net, Intel and ARM and and a couple
other people have contributed towards generation specific for their processors to the.net
framework as well as the surprising number of. Fixes, performance improvements and stuff from
just, you know, individual contributors to the community. Up until a few years ago, the Microsoft
we have today, this open Microsoft would have been unthinkable. With Auto Ship from Chewy,
you'll never miss a dose of your pet's prescription. Because getting our meds on time every time
is automatic. I'm Saranya Bark, And this is Command Line Heroes. OK, we've seen Titanic
battles to the love of millions of desktop users. We've seen open source software creep up
behind the proprietary Titans and nab huge market share. We've seen fleets of command line
heroes transform the programming landscape into the one handed down to people like me and
you. Today, big business is absorbing open source software through it all. Everybody is still
borrowing from everybody in the tech Wild West. It's always been that way. Apple gets inspired
by Xerox. Microsoft gets inspired by Apple. Linux gets inspired by Unix. Evolve. Borrow.
Constantly. Grow. In David and Goliath terms, open source software is no longer David. But you
know what? It's not even Goliath either. Open source has transcended. It's become the
battlefield that others fight on. So as the open source approach becomes inevitable, new wars,
wars that are fought in the cloud, wars that are fought on the oppressors. Battlefield or Ramping
Up? Here's author Steven Levy. Basically, right now we have 4 or five companies, if you count
Microsoft, then in various ways are fighting to be the platform for all we do for artificial
intelligence sake. So you know, you see wars between intelligent assistance. And guess what?
You know? 1000 intelligent assistant Siri. Microsoft has one Cortana, you know, Google has a
Google as assistant, Samsung has an intelligent assistant, and Amazon has one of Alexa. So
we see the these battles shifting to different areas there. So maybe you could say the hottest.
One is sort of the whose AI platform is going to control all the stuff in our lives there, and those
five companies are all competing for that. And if you're looking for another rebel that's going to
sneak up behind Facebook or Google or Amazon and blind side them the way Linux blindsided
Microsoft, you might be looking a long time because as author James. Always points out being a
true rebel is only getting harder and harder. Scales always been an advantage, but the nature of
scale advantages are almost whereas I think previously they were more linear in nature, now it's
more exponential in nature and so once you start to get out in front with something like this, it
becomes harder and harder for a new player to come in and catch up and. I think this is true of
the Internet era in general, whether it's scale like that or the importance and advantages that
data bestow on an organisation in terms of its ability to compete. Once you get out in front, you
attract more customers and then that gives you more data and that enables you to do an even
better job and then why on earth would you wanna go with? We said #2 play because they're so
far behind. I think it's gonna be no different in cloud. This story began with singular heroes like
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but the progress of technology has taken on a crowdsourced,
organic feel, and I think it's telling that our open source hero line, history Falls didn't even have a
real plan when he first invented the Linux kernel. He was a brilliant young developer for sure.
But it was also like a single drop of water at the very front of a tidal wave. The revolution was
inevitable. It's been estimated that 4 proprietary company to create a Linux distribution in their
old fashioned proprietary way. It would cost them well over $10 billion. That points to the power
of open source. In the end, it's not something that proprietary model is going to compete with.
Successful companies have to remain open. That's the big, ultimate lesson in all this, and
something else to keep in mind. When we're wired together, our capacity to grow and build on
what we've already accomplished becomes limitless. As big as these companies get, we don't
have to sit around waiting for them to give us something better. Think about the new developer
who learns to code for the sheer joy of creating. The mom who decided that if nobody's gonna
build what she needs, then she'll build it herself or tomorrow's great programmers come from,
they're always gonna have the capacity to build the next big thing. So long as there's access to
the command line. That's it for two-part tail on the OS wars that shaped our digital lives. The
struggle for dominance moved from the desktop to the server room and ultimately into the cloud.
Old enemies became unlikely allies, and a crowdsourced future left everything open. And listen,
I know there are 100 other heroes we didn't have space for in this history trip, so drop us a line.
Share your story. redhat.com/command Line Heroes. I'm listening. We're spending the rest of
the season learning what today's heroes are creating and what battles are going through to
bring their creations to life. Come back from more tales from the epic front lines of programming.
We drop a new episode every two weeks, and a couple weeks time we bring you Episode 3,
The actual revolution. Clear Line Heroes is an original podcast from Red Hat. For more
information about this and past episodes, go to redhat.com/command Line Heroes. Once you're
there, you can also sign up for our newsletter. And to get new episodes delivered automatically
for free, make sure to subscribe to the show. Just search for Command Line heroes. In Apple
Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Cast Box, or however you get your podcasts, then hit subscribe
so you'll be the first to know when new episodes are available. I'm surrounded by Rick. Thanks
for listening and keep on coming.