What is Linux? Eight Ways It Changed Our Lives, Part 3

The first two articles in this series explored the far-reaching impacts of Linux on computing, business, and public access to software. This article concludes the series, covering the following trends:

• Sparking interest in the newly recognized phenomenon of crowdsourcing
• Furnishing a large data source for research
• Accelerating development and adoption of new, low-cost hardware platforms

Interest in Crowdsourcing

For a long time, ordinary people weren’t allowed to participate in decision-making on a corporate or government scale. Beth Simone Noveck, in Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing, writes that in the twentieth century, universities “gradually redefined public service as a position demanding the expertise of university-educated professionals” (pp. 70-71). She underlines that professions “exclude those who do not belong to them from sharing in the body of knowledge their members claim” (p.47). And she goes on to show the limitations of those assumptions, along with remedies.

Change really started in the 1950s and 1960s, when civil rights activists were calling for a wholesale re-evaluation of “expertise.” Citing catastrophes from the Tuskegee syphilis study to the destruction of neighborhoods by highways, African-Americans started a movement for bringing into policy-making the voices of those directly affected by it. They were soon joined by other underheard populations: indigenous peoples, other people of color, women, youth, lesbians and gays, the disabled (or differently abled), mental health patients, and the poor.

I think the lessons of these movements underpinned an interest in what journalist James Surowiecki called “The wisdom of crowds” in 2004. The trend eventually picked up its own label: crowdsourcing, documented in a 2009 book by Jeff Howe.

Like Benkler, whose famous article led off the first part in this series, researchers trying to grasp the new, nonintuitive practice looked at free software, because developers had spontaneously developed productive collaboration over long distances before the researchers discovered it. Everybody focused on the Linux kernel community because what they achieved in just a few years was spectacular: a re-creating of Unix that blasted its way past all the existing Unix implementations, including the BSD variants.

The Linux community was not a perfect exemplar of collaboration—far from it. Rather, we must see it as a step along the way to better online communities. Later free software developers built on the experience of the Linux community, along with other important communities such as the Apache Project. Later communities developed best practices, such as fostering diversity and excluding toxic communications.

Crowdsourcing is now a major movement among governments at all levels, from the municipal to the international. One can see the health of this movement in the many projects undertaken by The GovLab, an organization founded by Professor Noveck, who was quoted earlier.

Meanwhile, the Linux kernel still ranks as one of the most popular and productive free software development projects. Recent developer statistics heralded “one of the busiest development cycles in the kernel’s history” with more developers than any previous kernel release. The Linux Foundation, originally created to protect the Linux trademark and other formal interests, has become the largest and most influential organization in free software, and a host for many other free software projects.

The dominance of developers paid by large corporations doesn’t invalidate the idea of peer collaboration—on the contrary, the corporate uptake underscores its enduring value. We’ll explore the corporate aspects in the next section.

A Large Data Source for Research

As we saw in the previous section, Linux inspired researchers and observers to look for new opportunities provided by large-scale online collaboration. But Linux also provided the foundation for the next step: actual research into how collaboration works.

Some open source projects are spectacularly successful; some fizzle out quickly; others are suspended somewhere in the middle. But all projects could use guidance in how to attract contributors and make the most of their efforts.

Researchers in sociology, organizational development, computer science, and other disciplines have developed interest in questions such as: Who contributes to online projects and why? Are their contributions adequately reviewed? How are stresses and disagreements handled?

The Linux kernel offers data of extraordinary size and value for such research: a constantly growing code base provided by more than 5,000 developers each year. (Wikipedia is another large, open, public data source that’s valuable for research.)

For instance, a 2020 academic paper jointly published by the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) scours the public archives of the Linux kernel to determine the strengths and weaknesses of different workflows for maintaining complex software systems.

Hopefully, managers, teachers, and other people responsible for coordinating projects will learn from Linux how to run groups of creative people more effectively over time.

Accelerated Development and Adoption of New Hardware

Linux has also freed hardware. The Raspberry Pi, running a Linux distribution they call Raspberry Pi OS, inspires thousands of tinkerers as well as commercial developers. To get a sense of the possibilities opened up by this hardware, peruse their magazine or Make.

Computers are in everything; affluent people can see that just by looking around their homes. Vendors promise “smart devices” that can track their preferences and react intelligently to their environment. There are even big hopes for the environmental and economic advantages of “smart cities.” Large-language models and other modern AI, although their hallucinations and potential bias generate controversy, clearly allow even more participation of computers in our lives.

Now, computing in our everyday existence is brought to life by affordable hardware, enhanced by the many libraries of powerful software developed by Linux, Python, and other communities. While proprietary smart devices are likely to collect information on our behavior, free devices offer a different contract. Programmers can check the free devices and let the public know whether private data is at risk. The device manufacturers, knowing that their tracking can be tracked, may think twice about spying on users. (Security experts do track proprietary devices, too, by watching the traffic over wires or the network.)

Android must rank as the most successful hardware partner of Linux. This phone software, which runs on about 70% of mobile phones, is not actually very open because Google controls its development, as well as the lucrative “Google Play Services” required to market most commercial Android apps. But the license is a free one, so a worldwide community of embedded systems developers are adapting Android to their devices.

Finally, Linux has been ported to more processors than any operating system in history. The wealth of software available on Linux provides an entry point for people who want to use these chips, a reassuring hand-up for both developers and chip manufacturers. As companies race to invent new processors for artificial intelligence, Linux is the obvious choice for their systems.

An exciting recent addition to the roster of Linux chips is the open specification for a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) called RISC-V. Historically, RISC architectures have shown a great deal of promise and have influenced traditional chips, such as those from Intel. The open RISC-V might spur innovation in processors in a manner similar to what Linux has done for software. And of course, RISC-V can run Linux.

A Total Revolution

Linux is a unique phenomenon, just as liberating for under-represented world populations as it is for the world’s largest corporations. Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and other giant companies contribute large sums of money toward software that lets lower-class and isolated communities build knowledge and collective will.

Like all revolutions, Linux has profoundly changed ways of working and thinking for people who originally never heard of it. The economic contributions of Linux and free software are incalculable—literally, because of their uncontrolled distribution—but undeniably enormous.

Looking over the changes made by 35 years of Linux, one suspects that it will participate heavily in trends over the next 35 as well.

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