The Future Of Linux: Evolving Everywhere

Cemented as a cornerstone of IT, the open source OS presses on in the face of challenges to its ethos and technical prowess

Mark Shuttleworth's recent closure of Ubuntu Linux bug No. 1 ("Microsoft has a majority market share") placed a meaningful, if somewhat controversial, exclamation point on how far Linux has come since Linus Torvalds rolled out the first version of the OS in 1991 as a pet project.

Microsoft may not (yet) have been taken down on the quickly fading desktop, but the nature of computing has changed completely, thanks in large part to Linux's rise as a cornerstone of IT. There's scarcely a part of computing today, from cloud servers to phone OSes, that isn't powered by Linux or in some way affected by it.

But where from here? If Linux acceptance and development are peaking, where does Linux go from up? Because Linux is such a mutable phenomenon and appears in so many incarnations, there may not be any single answer to that question.