Growth, Companies and Money
In the last part we saw that with the GPL, the Linux kernel stayed free and selling it was allowed. But a practical problem remained. The kernel and the GNU tools were thousands of separate pieces. Installing and configuring them was exhausting for ordinary users and even for many experts. Someone had to assemble the pieces, test them and package them as something you could actually install.
Packaging freedom
This is where distributions came in: ready-made collections bundling the kernel, tools, applications and an installer. Some were purely volunteer projects. In 1993 Ian Murdock founded Debian, a distribution built by a community of volunteers, as it still is.
Others were companies. Red Hat, founded in 1993, and SUSE in Germany were among the first to build businesses on the idea. The obvious question was: if anyone can take the same code for free, what are these companies selling?
The answer lay in what organisations need. A bank or a factory doesn't just need code. It needs to know that if its server fails at 3 a.m., someone will answer. It needs timely security updates, a stable version for years, and trained staff. These companies sold peace of mind: support, testing, assurance and training. The code was free; the service around it was valuable.
Enter the giants
As the 1990s turned into the 2000s, big technology companies joined one by one. Their logic was simple. Building and maintaining a proprietary operating system is very expensive. If several companies work on a shared kernel, the cost is spread among them, and each can spend its energy on what truly sets it apart.
So engineers paid by rival companies ended up working side by side on the same code. Every patch, whichever company it came from, went through the same public review and had to convince the maintainers. A company's name earned no special privilege; the quality of the code decided. For the companies, this was a new and sometimes uncomfortable discipline: their engineers had to argue in public, accept criticism from strangers and sometimes see their work rejected. Supporters of the model argue that this discipline made the code better for everyone.
A home for the project
As the project grew, a new question arose: who should pay Torvalds and other key maintainers without threatening their independence? If one company hired him, its rivals might doubt his neutrality.
The answer was non-profit organisations funded jointly by companies. Torvalds worked for years at one of them, OSDL. In January 2007, OSDL merged with the Free Standards Group to form the Linux Foundation, led by Jim Zemlin. The foundation became Torvalds' employer and the project's backer.
The turning point
The turning point of this era was a new pattern: rivals cooperate on a shared base and compete on the layers above. By 2018, according to LWN, around 4,000 people were contributing to the kernel each year. That scale would have been impossible without corporate money, and without the GPL's rules companies would not have dared to invest.
Lesson for businesses
Value isn't always in the product itself. Often it lies in the service, trust and support around it. If your core product is easy for others to obtain, ask what customers are really paying for.
Second, cooperating with competitors on shared infrastructure can benefit everyone. Not every company needs to reinvent the wheel; real competition happens closer to the customer.
Third, institutionalise neutrality. When several stakeholders depend on one project, an independent structure that none of them owns keeps everyone's trust.
Next: where is that "small hobby", the one that wasn't supposed to be big and professional, today? Probably in your pocket. But that growth had a human cost too.
Sources
- "A Brief History of Debian", Debian Project, n.d. — https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/
- "About Red Hat (founded 1993)", Red Hat, n.d. — https://www.redhat.com/en/about/company
- "About SUSE", SUSE, n.d. — https://www.suse.com/company/about/
- "FSG and OSDL to merge; form Linux Foundation", Linux.com, 2007-01 — https://www.linux.com/news/fsg-and-osdl-merge-form-linux-foundation/
- "Code, conflict, and conduct (≈4,000 contributors/year)", LWN.net, Jonathan Corbet, 2018-09-18 — https://lwn.net/Articles/765108/
