Linux Journal began in 1994, the same year Linus Torvalds released Linux 1.0. Since then, the magazine has been at the very core of both the Linux community and the Linux phenomenon as a whole.

Linux Journal has always been written by and for the Linux community. And it shares that community's main concern: how do we put this remarkable operating system to work?

Answering that question accounts for the explosive growth in Linux popularity, because Linux is simply the most useful operating system ever created. Linux takes all the well-known virtues of UNIX and makes them extremely easy to apply and improve. Because its source code is open, and the whole community is welcome to help improve that code, Linux has grown to serve the needs of that community in better and better ways. Today, it is exactly what everyone wants from an operating system: something that is efficient, reliable, easy to implement and inviting to developers of all kinds.

What makes Linux different from other mainstream operating systems? Microsoft's Windows and Windows NT, Apple's Macintosh and even the many other flavors of UNIX that have been around for decades is that Linux is a product of the software building trade, rather than the vendors who supply that trade. It is built, literally, to serve the needs of the people who put it to work, rather than the urges of vendors to control markets and make life difficult for competitors.

This is why Linux is now doing to the software business what the Internet has already done to the networking business: it is changing that business from a war between vendors into a wide-open universe of opportunities for every industry that stands to benefit from computing solutions in the literal meaning of that word. Linux has become the ideal problem-solving platform with applications that are easy to build, improve and maintain, in highly useful and reliable ways. That fact alone is bound to change the world.

Read about those changes first in Linux Journal.