The personal computer industry is about to arrive at a "tipping point" in which everything changes and those who get ahead of the curve earn social and cultural advantages over those who don't.
A social or economic tipping point is characterized by a sudden burst of mass sanity as mainstream public opinion abandons an unsustainable mythology in favor of something closer to reality. Such reversals usually have a sustaining mythology of their own, complete with an acceptable explanation for previous behavior. In the case of the PC industry tipping point now upon us, that mythology is built around the legend of Linus Torvalds.
According to the legend, Mr. Torvalds, a poor graduate student in Finland, single-handedly invented a computer operating system  called Linux along with a free public distribution method called open source and then used this Robin Hood combination of product and method to stand tall against the forces of evil in the form of Microsoft , Intel, IBM and other huge international corporations involved in personal computing .
In reality, the facts around which this myth evolved were generally right, but the perceptions built around them were almost completely wrong. Torvalds is Finnish, did start work on Linux as a graduate student, did freely distribute his work using the Internet and did motivate tens of thousands of very bright people to copy, use and extend his work. As a result, he really is an inspirational figure in the industry whose work has been pivotal in getting the world of small systems computing where it is today.
More Than Unix?
On the other hand, Linux is no more than another expression of the core Unix ideas originated at what was then AT&T 's Bell Laboratories by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and others in the early 1970s. The open-source movement is just a faster, Internet-enabled implementation of the much older academic tradition of peer review and building on foundations laid by others.
Furthermore, the Linux operating system itself is neither a new invention nor a stand-alone product. It consists of a Linux kernel developed by Torvalds and his colleagues by radically improving an earlier open-source Unix released by Andrew Tannenbaum in 1987, the Gnu utilities developed by the free software foundation, several graphical user interfaces akin to Microsoft's Windows brand products and a slew of third-party applications. (continued...)
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