ABSTRACT

A REAL THREAT TO MICROSOFT’S DOMINANCE OF THE DESKTOP OPERATING system workspace could come from the creation by a Finnish student Linus Torvalds in the form of a freely available operating system-Linux. Linux was originally developed by Linus and then enhanced, debugged, and completely rewritten by thousands of programmers around the world, and today poses a credible threat to the domination of Microsoft. While Linux is still a few years away from appearing on every desktop around the world, its use as a server operating system has shown a remarkable increase over the past year. International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that shipments of Linux for use on servers rose by about 212 percent in 1998, capturing about 17.2 percent of the market compared to 35.8 percent for Windows NT. This chapter presents a look at the world of Linux.