Bryce McDonnell

I recently read this article at FastCompany’s website about Linux: the open source, freely available operating system. While it technically competes with Windows and Mac OS X, most users have probably never heard of it. Most data center admins probably couldn’t live without it. It has a commanding lead in the enterprise hosting space and is responsible for hosting most of the websites on the Internet today. This website, for example, is hosted on a Linux box somewhere in Texas.

The article was profound in explaining Linux’s potential power play in the netbook arena; netbooks are small low power laptops. They’re great for surfing the web, doing emails and many other normal, everyday, tasks. Their low power makes them very affordable but has a major shortcoming when it comes to loading an operating system. Without a lot of memory (Ram) or hard drive space, large operating systems with many background processes would cripple the tiny netbook and render them useless.

Enter Linux. Linux is a highly configurable dream of an operating system that technologists love to play with. Because of its configurability, it’s a perfect candidate to run on a netbook. Processes that are never used can be shut off automatically. Shutting down processes means 1) more memory to do web surfing 2) more processor cycles for web surfing and 3) less space taken up on the hard drive.

Another very important consideration is spyware/malware. Linux is a very secure system by its very nature. The kernel (the brains of the OS) is more protected by its very design. Because of its seemingly insignificant market penetration, spammers and malware developers don’t have any incentive to develop their bugs for this OS. Linux wins again.

Finally, slapping Linux on the netbook follows a bigger trend in the commodization of hardware. Computers are getting cheaper and cheaper as business processes become more efficient and components become less expensive. The operating system has become a bigger slice of the total purchase price of a system. As hardware continues to become more of a commodity, vendors like IBM, HP and DELL will look for ways to jettison the proportionately higher cost of the OS.

As netbooks become more popular, Linux will become more familiar. This familiarity will enhance a seemingly insignificant player in the consumer operating system battle and that could really change the game.

original link:

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/2009-year-linux-revolution

Tags: business/entrepreneurship, linux, technology