Is Linux Irrelevant?

As the story goes, in the late eighties Bill Gates was asked about the competition Unix posed to Microsoft. He smiled and asked, “Which Unix?”

The same could be said of Linux today. Which Linux? Linux is now defined mostly by the fact that it isn’t any one single thing — no one distribution, software house, or entity has the last word on what Linux is going to be. To that end, the only “Linux” worth calling out by that name alone is the Linux kernel itself — a kernel which is continually repackaged and distributed in a slew of different ways…