Is it possible for the Internet to exist without Linux?

Can the Internet exist without Linux?

The Linux Foundation recently released a humorous film depicting life without a Web search. Its tagline was "It's difficult to picture a world without Linux." "A world without Linux would be a world without the Internet," it continued.

In September 1969, the Internet began as ARPAnet, a government-sponsored packet-switching network. Linus Torvalds didn't arrive on the scene until December 1969.

The comic is about Internet search, not the Internet itself. In 1991, the World Wide Web was born. It debuted on NeXTStations. These were Unix workstations developed by Steve Jobs. They are the forerunners of today's Mac computers. Torvalds had just revealed that he was working on the operating system we now know as Linux, while Tim Berners-Lee was implementing the first Web servers.

So, now that we've had our history lesson, how does The Linux Foundation get away with saying that the Internet wouldn't exist if Linux didn't exist?

It's due to the fact that they are correct. You know, the Internet, not the pre-Web Internet. Its Archie, elm, and Gopher, which mostly ran on BSD Unix, are all available on Linux.

Say hello to web browsers in their infancy (gallery)

Only two of the top twenty-five websites in the world, according to Alexa, do not run Linux. Both live.com and bing.com are Microsoft properties. Everyone else, including Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and others, runs Linux.

When you dig a little deeper, Linux's centrality to the Web becomes even clearer. According to W3Cook's research of Alexa data, Linux is used by 96.3 percent of the top 1 million web servers. The remaining 1.9 percent is split between Windows and FreeBSD (1.8 percent).

While Cisco iOS powers much of the Internet's networking infrastructure, Linux-based switch operating systems like Cumulus Linux, Big Switch's Switch Light, and VyOS, an open-source derivative of Vyatta, also play a role.

We know Google operates on Linux and produces Linux-based Android and Chrome OS, thus the animation focuses on search. What about the rest of the search engines? Bing, the second most popular search engine, runs on Windows Server 2012.

Yahoo, the third most popular search engine, used to run FreeBSD, but the company switched to its own Linux, YLinux, several years ago. Ask and AOL (yep, even now) are the other two top English-language search engines, and they both run Linux.

Of course, rather than just using search, more and more individuals are using social media to find new web pages these days. According to Shareaholic, "the top 8 social networks collectively drove 31.24 percent of overall traffic to sites" by the end of 2014.

What's number one? Facebook, of course, on Linux. Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube, in that order. And what are they going to run? I'll give you three guesses, the first two of which aren't valid. Of course, it's Linux.

In short, the Internet as we know it today would not be possible without Linux.

Why did you choose Linux over another operating system? Because Linux is the only operating system that offers stability, de facto uniformity, great stability and security, and low cost. Despite all the talk about how "hard" Linux is, it was the ideal operating system for bringing the Internet from engineers to the general public.

To put it another way, Linux is responsible for every Facebook post, YouTube video, and Google search you conduct.