Linux is 20 years old today

So, 20 years on, what runs Linux? An easier question to answer might be, what doesn't?

Linux runs on almost everything from wristwatches through music players, smartphones, tablets, TV set-top boxes and DVRs, PC netbooks, notebooks, desktops and servers, huge datacentres at Google, Amazon, Rackspace and almost all smaller hosting providers, on IBM mainframes under VM, all the way up to more than 80 per cent of the world's Top 500 supercomputers, each comprising thousands of processors.

Large financial houses run Linux systems, although they didn't talk about it much 10 years ago because they regarded it as a competitive advantage. But now Wall Street, the City of London and other major financial centres depend on tens of thousands of Linux systems for everything from broker workstations through high-frequency trading systems and back-end analytical number crunching.

The centre for European nuclear research CERN and its massive international network of university reseachers develop and run Scientific Linux.

The US military runs Linux, having worked out that it costs about one-tenth the price of proprietary Unix systems.

Russia, China, India and several other countries and regional governments develop their own Linux distributions.

The only computers today that notably don't run Linux are IBM mainframes running Z OS, Unix servers, mass market Windows desktop and laptop PCs, a rapidly diminishing number of low-end smartphones that run the Symbian OS, and devices made for Apple to run its locked-down proprietary operating systems.

Arguably, Microsoft has only maintained its Windows dominance on consumer PCs by using its market power to pressure the major PC makers, large corporations and even some governments to continue buying Windows and Microsoft Office every few years. But even without regulatory antitrust action, that cannot continue forever.

The Linux derivative Android mobile OS ships on nearly half of all smartphones and is set to take first place in smartphones by 2015, according to industry analysts.

Linux has come a long way in 20 years, and its next 20 years should be just as interesting and successful. Linus Torvald's tongue-in-cheek goal of Linux world domination might not be realised yet, but it has made a lot of progress. µ