What's Penginus Got To Do With It?

I don't know how it started. Maybe because my sister used to refer to them as "ping wings" when we were kids. Maybe its the way they walk, waddle, slide and jump up and down. Maybe it's the way they always look like they're dressed for a formal occassion. But, somewhere between my younger years and now, I developed a real affinity for the nutty creatures!

As long as I can remember, I've had an interest in computers. Sometime along the way, the Linux operating system appeared, and they adopted Tux the Penguin as their logo. How often do two things you have an interest in come together? How could I resist?

Have you heard of Linux? It came out of nowhere (well, Finland, technically) initially developed by Computer Science student Linus Torvalds, who had an interest in operating systems He wrote the lower layer stuff as a hobby, and then posted the source code (the secret recipe) on the Internet. Other people started to contribute to it, and they recruited some friends, who recruited some friends, and so on, and so on... and before you could say "Bill Gates is a billionnaire" the free software movement took off and Linux was born.

As the mighty army of Linux volunteers worked on developing the software, adding features, fixing bugs, and writing documentation, corporate resistance to adopting Linux in the enterprise continued. (Unofficially at the time its use was rampant, but one story at a time!)

In 1996 Linus started a competition to create a logo for Linux to try to soften the image for the corporation. It was felt that Linux was too geeky for anyone outside the server room to care about. Certainly the president of a company was being told by the likes of Microsoft that Linux was risky, buggy, unreliable and unsupported. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black... so many tempting rabbit trails... sigh...) Apprently, it was known that Linus had a fixation for flightless, fat waterfowl. :) One of these volunteers, Larry Ewing designed a logo that would be cute, but also corporate. That's how Tux was born.

And it worked! Or, it helped, at any rate. By the time 1999 rolled around, Linux had captured 28% of the public Web server market. Today, Linux by far outpaces every other operating system on the Internet. Google uses it for their search farm of thousands of servers. The place where I work uses it for all their servers. The place where I used to work is reportedly replacing as much of what they have with Linux servers.

Fast forward to today, and now Linux has large and growing share of the desktop, too. And the penguins are just as popular.