Unthinkable Things #1: Linux and war

When Linus Torvalds announced the launch of his open-source operating system, Linux, in 1991, he described it as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu".

image by Alan Trotter - some rights reserved (Creative Commons 2.0)

In April 2007, Brigadier General Nick Justice, the Deputy Program Officer for the US Army's Program Executive Office, Command, Control and Communications Tactical said: "Open source software is part of the integrated network fabric which connects and enables our command and control system to work effectively, as people's lives depend on it. When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source. It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is the single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer."

See http://www.linux.com/archive/feed/61302. 

In 2008, Marat Guriev, a representative of IBM in Eastern Europe and Asia, gave an overview of developments on open source software and open standards in Russia. He described how the Russian military has been working on its own version of GNU/Linux, parts of which have recently been declassified by the All-Russian Scientific and Research Institute of Control Automation in the Non-Industrial Sphere (Vniins). According to Guriev, many specialised version of GNU/Linux distributions are produced, often in response to requests by local governments. 

See http://www.osor.eu/news/lv-minister-open-standards-improve-efficiency-and-transparency.

Linux has now overtaken Windows as the operating system of choice for web servers and supercomputers, and is increasingly being adopted by corporations and governments around the world.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_adoption.