Linux is Truly Everywhere
by Reuven Lerner - Mar. 09, 2008Comments (7)- Related Blog Posts
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As hardware gets smaller and cheaper, we can expect to see Linux in more and more unexpected places. Why is this, and how does this benefit open-source developers?
A few months ago, I was flying from Chicago to Tel Aviv. The airplane was one of El Al's newly refurbished models, with individual video screens and on-demand video screening. The advantage of such screens is that they give each passenger a choice regarding when and what to watch. So if you eat or fall asleep, you don't have to worry about missing the movie; you can stop and start it, just as if you had a DVD player or video-on-demand.
The bad news with such a system is that if your screen fails to work, there's no real way for you to watch along with your neighbor. Sure enough, on this particular flight, my screen failed just after takeoff. I called over the flight attendant and told her about my problem. She said, much to my surprise, that she would restart my video screen, and that it would probably work after that.
Well, my screen did indeed restart. And as it did so, I got to see the entire Linux bootup process, step by step, including a picture of Tux the penguin observing the entire thing. About two minutes later, the Linux box had completely rebooted, and I was able to watch a movie.
I spent a long time smiling about the Linux bootup screen that I had just seen. To begin with, it reminded me that Linux, and other open-source products, are now everywhere. Linux is no longer for the uber-geeks. It's not just for system administrators and programmers, either. Linux is now at the core of mainstream appliances, there even when you don't think that a computer or operating system might be involved.
Secondly, Linux is at the core of these devices because it's free, it's stable, and it's modifiable. Touch-sensitive, video-on-demand devices were probably not a main concern of the Linux kernel developers. But because they created an open platform, and because they have tried to make it easy to adapt all sorts of hardware to work with it, I expect that writing the necessary device drivers wasn't that difficult. It didn't hurt that Linux is free of charge; this meant that money could be spent on development efforts, rather than software licenses. And if the kernel needed to be modified or improved to handle this hardware, the kernel developers probably welcomed the change.
Finally, Moore's Law and the general trend toward cheaper and faster hardware means that Linux now fits into even more places than it did before. We normally think of Linux as an operating system for servers, or even for desktop computers. But we can expect Linux to be at the heart of a growing number of appliances, from video-on-demand devices to digital video recorders (e.g., TiVo), to cellphones (e.g., Android and OpenMoko).
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