How 1 Idea Became an Ecosystem

In the early 1990's, commercial UNIX operating systems were thriving. Aimed at at-scale enterprise businesses, AIX, SCO UNIX, IRIX, HP-UX, and Solaris garnered widespread adoption, generating millions in licensing and support fees.

But then, something happened.

The Spark

On August 25th, 1991, a 21-year-old student from the University of Helsinki named Linus Torvalds wrote a message on a popular Usenet group. He announced a free and open source UNIX-like operating system called Linux.

Linux started to gain traction in the mid to late 1990s, along with a collection of projects ranging from programming languages like PHP, Perl, and Python, to databases like MySQL. Each of these were directly aimed at solving problems better than their commercial counterparts, at a greatly reduced cost.

In 1993, RedHat was founded, releasing a Linux distribution which bundled the Linux kernel with other open source software. RedHat successfully monetized their investment by offering commercial support for the distribution, and by the end of the decade they went public, delivering an explosive first-day stock price increase.

In just a few short years, Linux was the spark that ignited a movement, creating an entire ecosystem of free and open source tools.

So, what can we learn from this story? How does it relate to our current moment in time?

Catching Fire

Starting a fire requires several basic ingredients: kindling, fuel, oxygen, and a spark. We can map these ingredients to elements of our brief history of Linux's impact on open source.

The high cost and fragmentation of the commercial UNIX market represents the kindling, with conditions that create the potential for a fire. Torvalds' announcement of Linux is the spark that ignited the kindling, driving an early flurry of activity. Growing and sustaining the fire required a host of other open source projects, which represent fuel; a mountain of wood supporting continued growth. Finally, the oxygen was commercialization, fanning the flame to keep it burning strong.

But, the disruption didn't end there. 

Linux's initial fire lead to the creation of the LAMP stack, a shift away from Microsoft's operating systems for enterprise workloads, and Android, which is the most widespread and popular Linux-based operating system in the world. Linux isn't just a fire. It's a bonfire, spreading and starting additional disruptions by establishing an ecosystem.

The Next Bonfire

Evaluating the state of AI, it is pretty clear what our "spark" was – ChatGPT, which made an esoteric and complex technology instantly accessible to anyone. 

But, what was the kindling? Did we even know that we wanted or needed this technology? 

I'd say that this is a significant difference between Linux's market disruption versus AI's. What conditions represent the kindling? The answer requires us to extend our analogy.

I would argue that AI, like Cloud and Linux before it, isn't a single fire. It's a collection of dozens of fires, each with its own kindling. Pressure to improve productivity, previously unsolvable problems are becoming possible, accelerating time to market, etc. Each of these has been set alight by that initial spark.

AWS' early cloud services–S3, EC2, SQS–were revolutionary. Sending an API call and having access to a virtual server, billed by the minute, with ephemeral storage felt like magic to engineers. The first time that you used ChatGPT, I would wager that your experience felt magical. If we follow the throughline from Linux to Cloud to AI, we get an idea of what an AI ecosystem could look like ten years down the road.

Cloud brought us Infrastructure as Code, DevOps, Serverless, Kubernetes, and dozens of other fires. The Cloud ecosystem is as strong as it's ever been, sustaining itself for nearly 20 years. Just imagine what the next twenty will bring as a whole new AI ecosystem develops. We're in for quite a ride!