By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
The yearly LinuxCon and ContainerCon conferences took place this week in downtown Toronto, Canada to mark the landmark 25th anniversary of Linux as well as celebrate Open Source technology.
The keynotes and presentations attracted thousands of visitors eager to celebrate Linux as well as see the latest technologies.
With various key speakers and guests including Linux creator Linus Torvalds, the three day event highlighted various aspects of Linux including cloud services and infrastructure.
The Linux kernel now supports more than 80 different architectures, Torvalds said, and counts 22 million lines of code with more than 5,000 developers from about 500 companies contributing, according to the latest Linux Kernel Development Report released this week.
It is the big, professional project that Torvalds himself didn’t expect would see universal growth in that first public announcement 25 years ago.
The conference centre of the Westin Harbour Plaza hotel featured representatives from the biggest Linux companies including Red Hat, SUSE, CoreOS, Google, Oracle, Canonical, HP, IBM and, most surprisingly, Microsoft.
Microsoft Loves Linux
While Microsoft was once a bitter rival whose approach to software development was the antitheses of the open and collaborative nature of Linux, the company under CEO Satya Nadella has opened its system to support and even embrace Linux.
The Microsoft booth, which was one of the first that guests saw, was flanked by two large Tux Penguin statues and they were giving away “Microsoft Loves Linux,” stickers.
Microsoft has partnered with companies like Canonical (maker of Ubuntu) and Red Hat to enable enterprise interoperability solutions. Microsoft’s Azure Cloud infrastructure is also designed to play nice and work well with Linux which is the underlying technology of many cloud server and container-based solutions.
Microsoft has growing support for Linux on Azure including CoreOS, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Suse, and Ubuntu. This puts Microsoft’s Azure cloud in good standing to compete against Amazon and Google.
While Linux never managed to upstage Windows as a consumer operating system of choice, it managed to evolve into the language and toolkit that runs various cloud computing and enterprise back-end systems.
Linux is considered the operating system of the Cloud. The Linux Foundation says that, “to explore why Linux is so compelling for the cloud, it’s necessary to examine the characteristics that make Linux a natural foundation for the cloud. The widespread use of Linux in the cloud benefits both those who run and operate clouds, as well as those who build upon them.”
As eWeek states, “Linux in 2016 is about more than just an operating system. It is about a wider market of open-source technologies that Linux helps enable.”
Next year’s conference will be renamed the Open Source Summit and while it distances itself slightly from the innovative OS that Torvalds invented, it embraces the larger world of open source software and infrastructure solutions that reflect Linux’s place in the broader reality of today’s cloud and enterprise solutions.
