Driving forces behind Linux and open source growth
By Jack Wallen
December 3, 2012, 8:13 AM PST
It wasn’t just five years ago, the percentage of Linux being used in business was around 1%. When you made claims of growth, not one person in IT would listen. But as everyone knows, the landscape of IT changes faster than most. One minute you’re staring down the barrel of extinction and the next you’re being hoisted atop the shoulders of business claiming you a hero.
I wouldn’t exactly say that Linux and open source has been lifted on top of every shoulder — but the last five years have certainly seen some major expansion. Let’s take a look at some of the signposts that herald this growth.
Social networking
Let’s face it — eight million active users on a platform run by open source software cannot be denied as growth. That’s Facebook. The front-end of Facebook is served up on a LAMP server using the Big-IP product suite. Although many would deny this as a direct sign of growth (the vast majority of users use the site with the Windows platform), but without open source and Linux, Facebook wouldn’t exist.
Blogging is another element of “social networking” that highlights growth in Linux. Wordpress is one of the most wide-spread blogging software platforms available. It’s open source and, more often than not, runs on LAMP servers.
At this moment, there are 58,453,045 Wordpress-driven blogs in the blogosphere. Another fact that cannot be denied.
Even Twitter is run using Ruby on Rails (another open source stack) on Linux servers).
Enterprises “get it”
Take a look at the list below to see who makes use of Linux and open source (specific Linux distributions where noted):
Amazon
Google — Goobuntu
IBM — SLED
Twitter
McDonalds
Ernie Ball
Reddit — Debian
London Stock Exchange
Audi — SLED
New York Stock Exchange
BMW — SLED
Wikipedia — Ubuntu
Union Bank
Peugeot — SLED
Virgin America — Red Hat
Dreamworks
Novell
Burlington — Red Hat
Facebook — Based on CentOS
Nav Canada — Red Hat
Large enterprise business gets Linux and open source. They understand that reliability and security are key to keeping their businesses up and running. Now that is not to say Enterprise snubs it’s nose at Windows — it doesn’t. In fact, the enterprise desktop is still dominated by Windows 7 and XP — but up until recently, it was unheard of that any company would consider adopting Linux for the desktop. Now… there is no certainty in that statement. Anything is possible. And with Microsoft trying to force the hand of the desktop over to the multi-touch environment, the future of possibility for Linux on the enterprise desktop looks bright.
Game on!
Everyone should be aware by now that Valve has ported Steam to Linux. The beta of the software officially arrived November 7, 2012. This is BIG news. What this means is games will finally begin arriving on the Linux platform. Because of this move on Valve’s part, NVIDIA doubled up on the work for Linux NVIDIA drivers. The recent release of the official NVIDIA drivers (GeForce R310) actually doubles the performance and drastically reduces game load times on Linux.
With Steam, Linux users will be able to get their game on and, as usage spreads, more and more games will come to the Linux version of Steam. I would predict, within two years, the whole of the Steam library will be playable on Steam for Linux.
Android
The Samsung Galaxy S3 is one of the fastest selling smartphones in the world. It is estimated that Samsung sold 56-58 million smartphones in July-September 2012. These are all powered by open source software. Once again, these numbers tell a very powerful tale.
At a recent Motorola press event, Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, said nearly 1.3 million Android devices were activated daily, and of those, 70,000 were tablets. So even the Android tablet market is growing significantly.
This Linux momentum is building, brehs. The only FREE OS AND it's open sourced (Unlike Microsoft and Apple that force people to use their OS's and have to pay hundred's of dollars for upgrades 
). I've already put Linux (Ubuntu) on one of my laptops and it's 
. IT heads, I'm also starting to see more and more jobs ads looking for cats familiar with the Linux/Unix OS...Y'all better diversifying them certs or 
You're out of your fukking mind, breh.
