Penguin parties on

Yay Linux! On the eve of the tenth birthday of the Linux operating system, I`m sure that a little cheer would not be amiss.

A lot has been written about Linux over the past ten years and the system has enjoyed just as much criticism as it has fanatical evangelism. And while I could add to this monolith of Linux writings with yet another "Business Case for Linux" essay, I thought it appropriate to talk a little about what makes Linux so popular and why it inspires such dedication. After all, it is largely the unpaid, dedicated and often-unrecognised users of Linux that has made it what it is today. It is not just Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds who keep the candle burning.

At the risk of sounding trite, who remembers their first computer? I know I do. It was a Commodore 64 and at the time I would take time off school sick just to spend more time fiddling with this wonder of technology. Using the most basic of tools, I taught myself to make a simple calculator and a quiz game, and later, when I had perfected `sprites`, I made a range of simple games in the vein of downhill skiing. With only 64k of memory and only an audiotape for storage, the Commodore didn`t compare with the power available today, but I loved the machine nevertheless.

Then came Windows. I never really got into Windows because it didn`t inspire me to play around with the `internals` and was far too packaged for my liking. And when I started working in the media industry, Macintosh was the obvious choice, and I slipped deeper into the graphical user interface, and further away from the actual operation of the machine. Computing just wasn`t fun anymore, no matter how much you were awed by the seemingly endless possibilities offered by things like Photoshop and Freehand.

And Linux is no longer just a university project but a rapidly growing and widely adopted alternative to the mainstream commercial operating systems.

Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb

This changed a few years ago when I discovered Gnu/Linux. It wasn`t easy to install those early versions of the system and many a night was spent trying to get just a reasonably functional system up and running. I cursed Linux often and I gave it up a more than just a couple of times, but when it did work, the sense of achievement was enormous and it kept me coming back for more.

So much of Linux reminded me of the many hours I had spent in front of my Commodore screen. As I tweaked this and that, and tinkered away at the setup of my machine, I realised that this is what I had been missing for so long: fun. Fun and the option to turn my computer into anything I could dream of. To be honest, I don`t know how much work I actually got done in those first few years but I do know that I enjoyed myself, despite the look of frustration that no doubt crossed my face regularly.

Many years on and Linux turns ten this weekend and much has changed. Linus Torvalds is no longer the student that posted his work on the Internet and invited others to join in, but is something of a media personality. And Linux is no longer just a university project but a rapidly growing and widely adopted alternative to the mainstream commercial operating systems.

However, as much as things change so they stay the same, and it is still the Linux community that makes the system strong, just as it was the community of users that built the system up in the early days. In truth, the tenth birthday of Linux is not a celebration of the kernel itself but is rather a celebration of the hundreds of user groups around the world.

Without the user groups, Gnu/Linux would never have survived, that`s a fact. In my case, if it weren`t for the Gauteng Linux Users Group, the Linux user base in SA would likely have been one person poorer.

What the future holds for Linux is hard to predict. No doubt it will continue to grow and no doubt it will face the challenge of commercialisation, but so long as it remains free it will continue to draw users into its addictive community.