Linux - a Free OS

Better overall?

For applications other than games, Linux has definite advantages. There are few feelings better than installing Linux and watching your system boot to a graphical login in less than twenty seconds. Several months ago, a company called Mindcraft released benchmarks paid for by Microsoft that showed Windows NT smoking Linux in web serving performance. The flood of responses from the Linux community accused Mindcraft of intentionally stacking the deck against Linux by using a unrealistic hardware configuration, testing only static content, and by tuning Windows while using an out-of-the-box install of Linux. In general, most real world benchmarks show Linux edging out Windows NT in a multi-processor server environment.

I heard it's free. Is that warez?

Linux is a free operating system under the terms of the GNU Public License (GPL). To save you a lot of legal reading, I'll run down the basics. You can download any version of Linux and run it on your computer for free. You can download the source code and modify it however you want, as long as you make the modifications freely available. You can download Linux, burn it on a CD, and sell it for as much money as the market will bear (which is very little, since anybody can download it). This peculiar situation will probably make you ask, "Who owns Linux if it's free?", and "How do people make money from it?"

Nobody owns Linux. The trademark of the Linux name belongs to Linus Torvalds, but the actual code belongs to no single entity. Linus' ownership of the trademark allows him to guard against the fragmentation of Linux, since there can be only one "Linux Kernel". It also keeps an unscrupulous software company that could greatly benefit from Linux's demise (cough, cough) from releasing their own Linux kernel with proprietary enhancements. Linus has the final say about what goes into each release of the kernel, but he only writes a fraction of the actual code.

Who writes it? Thousands of developers have contributed code to various projects that in turn have contributed to the Linux kernel and to distributions of the entire operating system. Some of these developers are paid for their work; they are the ones who are employed by companies that have a vested interest in seeing Linux thrive (Red Hat, SuSE, SGI, graphic card manufacturers). However, the majority of developers contribute to Linux on their only time. It's this kind of dedication to good software that has allowed open-source software to leapfrog competing commercial systems in quality and stability.