Linux World Domination: Why It's Foolish To Bet Against Open Source Communities

jeremy · 07-01-2014, 10:09 AM

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Ten years ago Unix claimed five the top-10 fastest computers on the planet and 44% of the overall supercomputer market. Today? Unix, the once indomitable performance powerhouse, doesn't make the top-10 list of the world's fastest computers. Heck, it can't even crack the top 50. Not since Linux took over, that is.

Buried in these sobering statistics on the rise of Linux and the fall of Unix is a reminder to proprietary infrastructure software vendors that hope to compete with open source: you can't win. Not when the community gets involved.

This was not always obvious. Back in 1999 Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, whose company made expensive but high-performance Unix servers, went out of his way to browbeat Linux performance, arguing:

Linux is like Windows: it's too fat for the client, for the appliance ... it's not scalable for the server ... Now why in the world would anybody ever write another cheque to Microsoft? I don't know. But why would you do Linux either? That's the wrong answer.
McNealy could be forgiven for his myopia. After all, in 1999 Linux couldn't crack the top-10 of the venerable Top 500 list and, truth be told, Sun's Solaris did offer far better performance than Linux.

What neither Sun nor its Solaris could match was the Linux community.

And today Linux absolutely dominates the list of the world's top-500 fastest computers. A staggering 97% of the world's fastest supercomputers are powered by Linux, with just 2% powered by Unix (and none by Sun's Solaris). McNealy, running benchmarks against Linux, could never have prophesied such a dramatic reversal of his company's fortunes.