Article By Luca Grandi.
When open source started off in the 1980’s it sounded like a fairy tale world where good always triumphed, dragons were slain and all stories ended happily ever after. Although not a new concept, free sharing of technological information was a natural progression. If you consider that many things such as recipes, formulas and even patents have been shared since the beginning of time, you’ll realize that this was by no means a new idea.
In 1991, the Linux Kernel, which was started by Linus Torvalds, was released as a freely modifiable source code. Initially the license wasn’t the GPL, but in February 1992 when version 0.12 was released, Torvalds made sure he licensed it under the GNU General Public License. Torvalds was delighted that his kernel attracted much attention from volunteer programmers.
Up until this point no completely free-software operating systems were in existence due to the GNU’s lack of a working kernel, but the development of Torvalds’s kernel proved to be the final piece of the puzzle.
The X Window System was soon ported to Linux. In March 1992, Linux version 0.95 was the first to be capable of running X. This large version number jump (from 0.1x to 0.9x) was due to a feeling that a version 1.0 with no major missing pieces was imminent. However, this proved to be somewhat overoptimistic, and from 1993 to early 1994, 15 development versions of version 0.99 appeared.
In 1993 Patrick Volkerding released a distribution based on SLS, which he called Slackware, and this Linux distribution has survived all this years and is still alive and releasing new versions.
From this point the first complete free-software operating system came into being and the release of new Linux kernel continued at a fast pace.
While I’m writing this article the last stable release it’s the 3.8.5 released on 2013-03-28.
Nowadays many businesses and governments organizations use open source software such as Linux. With a great deal of advantages, price being one of the major contributing factors and customization being the other, the software continues to grow in popularity. The quality of the product cannot be faulted as often thousands of developers have contributed to the programs we have today, and very often it’s not only developers coming up with the final product but users who have also had their say in them too.
In 2012 Linux turned 20 years old and was celebrated with many events and video from all around the world
On the gaming side an important news has come in February 2013 when, after some time in beta, an official client for Steam has been released for Linux and this has been a great day for all the Linux gamers as Steam is one of the most important online distributor of games and its support will be very important for the spreading of the GNU/Linux platform.
While Linux has its many advantages there are, however, compatibility issues with certain programs
When it comes to online casinos, Linux casinos are few and far in between. Gamers who use the Linux operating system still swear by it and more and more Linux casinos are thus starting to emerge. This shows how Linux continues to influence the technological landscape and is still a force to be reckoned with. Web winnings South Africa continue to rise and many of the gamers are devoted Linux users who refuse to use other operating systems.
Linux and open source software are now, more than ever, here to stay and what started as a fairy tale has become a reality.
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