August 24, 2021 — As Linux turns 30 this year, ZDNet’s writer Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols publishes a year-by-year summary of the most significant events in Linux’s history to date. OIN makes the list when Microsoft made its entire patent portfolio subject to the OIN community patent cross-license in a remarkable pro-Open Source move. Many OIN members also make headlines for their accomplishments. IBM invested a billion dollars in Linux and broke the enterprise market ice for Linux. By 2019, over half of Microsoft’s customers’ Virtual Machine (VM) instances were running on Linux. Red Hat — acquired by IBM in 2019 for $34-billion — was the 1st billion dollar Linux company and the biggest software acquisition ever. SUSE is recognized as the top European Linux business.