Portability and versatility have had just as much impact on it’s popularity, and are why it’s generally won out over BSD (people talk about having to hunt to find hardware that works with Linux, but it’s generally much worse with BSD). The whole open-source factor is, however, a large part of why Linux has risen to the forefront among UNIX derivatives, but it’s again not the only factor. There are a bunch of factors involved, but the three biggest are that UNIX has traditionally supported much larger systems than alternatives (with the exception of VMS and Multics), is more efficient than many alternatives (both a cause and side effect of the popularity for scientific usage), and is actually (usually) easier to program for for new programmers.
VMS and Multics are the only two true operating systems that have even come close over the year). Linux isn’t particularly special here, UNIX-like systems have always dominated the scientific computing scene, regardless of whether or not the source is freely available. The growth of linux on servers is so significant that microsoft has had to deviate from it’s own monopoly tactics to support the linux server market: It’s a positive feedback loop, commercial developers will target the windows desktop because it has the market share rather than because of any intrinsic qualities.įor server side web development it’s actually the other way around and windows web servers are the outliers.
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Proprietary code often locks us in to windows. That seems plausible, I think a big factor is that the scientific community has access to the source code, and source code opens up opportunities for alternatives.
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Commercial software maybe, but very little in terms of widely used scientific software is actually comercial beyond hardware interface tools. Much of the ‘official’ hardware interface tools might be Windows only (although quite often a lot of the same things can be done with little effort from Linux), but there is very little in terms of actual computational software other than Matlab (which has 2 alternatives on Linux (Octave and FreeMat)) that is Windows exclusive.
Especially bioinformatics and chemistry related stuff. OK, I don’t know where you’re getting your info on scientific software specifically, but there’s quite a lot of it that’s Linux only.
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