How Linux Conquered the Data Center
Linux’s ubiquity in the data center wasn’t by design. It was the effect of a powerful and unpredictable undercurrent.
Some of the people who worked to create the original Linux operating system kernel remember this time with almost crystal clarity, as though a bright flashbulb indelibly etched its image on the canvasses of their minds.
In 1998 Red Hat was continuing to gather together names of new allies and prospective supporters for its enterprise Linux. Several more of the usual suspects had joined the party: Netscape, Informix, Borland’s Interbase, Computer Associates (now CA), Software AG. These were the challengers in the Windows software market, the names to which the VARs attached extra discounts. As a single glimpse of the Softsel Hot List or the Ingram Micro D sales chart would tell any CIO studying the market, none of these names were the leaders in their respective software categories, nor were they expected to become leaders.
One Monday in July of that year, Oracle added its name to Red Hat’s list.
“That was a seminal moment,” recalled Dirk Hohndel, now VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer. He happened to be visiting the home of his good friend and colleague, Linus Torvalds — the man for whom Linux was named. A colleague of theirs, Jon “Maddog” Hall, burst in to deliver the news: Their project was no longer a weekend hobby.
“Linus and I looked at each other and said, ‘Wow! That will change the world!’”
“When Oracle started to support their database on Red Hat Linux,” related Mark Hinkle, the Linux Foundation’s vice president of marketing, “that was a signal to the industry that you could trust your financial data to a Linux operating system.”
“It was an announcement of something that Oracle had planned to do,” noted Hohndel. “We all have seen how these announcements often play out.”
The advocates of free and open software, Hall among them, had long spoken about the inexorable march of progress and the alignment of free software with free expression. But history will show that the progenitors of Linux first perceived victory not when some debate opponent conceded the merits of the GNU license, but rather when a major commercial database vendor gave Linux its tacit stamp of approval.
The Facilitator
The tech journalists of the day — veterans of the battle between MS-DOS and OS/2, and between Windows and Macintosh — tended to view any prospective platform battle in the enterprise market as political warfare, whose key supporters signed up in one camp or the other.
Oracle’s news did not have a preassigned camp. A casual admission that Oracle was testing the Linux support waters appeared in paragraph 13 of InfoWorld’s page-5 news of an announcement by Informix that it would support Linux. Maybe Informix’s move was prompted, the piece suggested, by rumors of Linux running in Oracle’s labs.
The cover of Canada’s weekly Maclean’s magazine for July 20, featuring Red Hat founder Robert Young, was titled, “The War for the Desktop.” Right scale, wrong geography.
Oracle's then CEO, Larry Ellison, delivers a keynote address at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference October 25, 2006 in San Francisco. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)