There's something incredible happening today that hasn't ever really happened before. Thousands of people all over the world are working together to build something. This thing they are creating is incredibly complex and stunningly powerful; even beautiful. Hundreds of people have worked on it for years, yet few are paid to do so. They do it for the fun of it, for the love of creation, for the joy of being a part of something important and worthwhile. Best of all, their creation is absolutely Free: no one controls it; all who use it can modify or improve it, thereby becoming part of the team of creators.
This body of work is commonly called Free Software. It started as a varied collection of programs for UNIX computers, but it has become much more. The body of programs have increased in number and grown together into a cohesive whole: an Operating System. This unified manifestation of Free Software is known as Linux (or more properly, GNU/Linux).
When people use the term "Linux", they usually mean
the entire Free Operating System I've just described. However, Linux is in
reality just the foundation of the OS. It is the glue that holds all of
the Free Software together, and makes it run on your computer. In
technical terms, Linux is just the kernel of the GNU/Linux OS.
Linux (the kernel) was invented in the fall of 1991 by a 21-year-old Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. Torvalds remains the charismatic leader of Linux kernel development, overseeing the work of thousands of volunteer "kernel hackers" all over the world. He is perhaps the world's most famous computer programmer. The Linux kernel provides a Unix-like computer environment. Unix is one of the oldest, most powerful Operating Systems around. It pulls no punches, and hides nothing from its users, which some people regard as user un-friendliness. However, it's really user enlightenment. Everything the computer does, you can control. Nothing is taken for granted, and nothing is hidden from view.
GNU is an acronym for GNU's Not Unix, which is humorously ironic, because
GNU is Unix, almost. In 1985, computer programming guru Richard M. Stallman
wrote the GNU Manifesto,
which outlined his plan to develop a Free version of the Unix OS.
Note that "Free" is capitalized; Stallman was talking about liberty,
not gratis. In other words, "free as in speech, not as in beer". What does
liberty have to do with computer software, you might ask? Stallman saw
companies who sold software as evil,
in a way, because they
destroyed a
long-standing tradition among computer users to share code and
improvements to each other's code. With proprietary software, you could
use their program, but you couldn't see the code, much less try to improve
it. Even if a company did allow you to see their code and make
improvements, they wouldn't let you distribute the improved version, or
even tell anyone about it. This was unacceptable to RMS. He would much
rather have a situation where software was open and Free. Anyone should be
able to use a program, to examine its code, and to share changes with the
world. He founded GNU to bring just that
situation about.
The GNU project has not yet resulted in a complete OS by itself, but they do provide many Free programs for the Unix OS (such as the emacs text editor, the gcc compiler, and many, many others). Perhaps the most important contribution of Stallman's GNU project wasn't software at all, however. It was, of all things, a legal document. A license, to be precise.
The GNU General Public License (GPL) is the license governing most Free Software. Almost all software comes with some kind of license (you know that window of dense, capitalized text that you click on without reading when installing Windows software? That's a license, but you can bet the farm that it isn't the GPL). Among software licenses, the GPL is extremely unique. Other licenses require that the user agree to forfeit rights they would otherwise have under standard copyright law. The GPL grants the user additional rights, which are not granted under standard copyright law. As an indication of this sort of inversion of copyright, GPL'd software is sometimes said to be "copyleft" instead of copyright.
The GPL basically says: "as a user of this program, you have the right to examine, modify and redistribute it and its source code. The only stipulation is that your modified code must also be Free; your users must have the same rights that you were given."
Microsoft calls this stipulation "destructive", "cancerous", and "un-American".
GNU/Linux, as the name implies, is a wonderful confluence of these two independent effort s to bring about a Free, Unix-like OS. Linus Torvalds and his crew of hackers had the kernel, but not much software. Richard Stallman and his GNU cohorts had lots of Free Software, but lacked a kernel. It was a perfect match. Starting in the early 1990s, people really started noticing this thing called Linux. Backed by a veritable army of thousands (!) of volunteer (!!) developers, it was constantly improving by leaps and bounds, at a rate undreamed of in the world of proprietary software. When it comes to Linux developers, don't mistake "volunteer" for "amateur". These people are expert hackers. Gurus.
The trouble was, you almost had to be a guru to run Linux, and it was even more difficult to install it on a machine. Unix is a computer environment designed by hackers, for hackers. Fundamentally, the user interface is a simple command line; a text prompt at which you type commands. Simple does not mean primitive, however. The command prompt provides access to a dizzying array of single-purpose programs which can be strung together in "scripts", and combined in more complicated compiled programs. To a true Unix guru, the windows, menus, scrollbars, buttons, bells and whistles so familiar to Windows/Mac users are useless fluff at best, and a cumbersome, unnecessary, debilitating layer of abstraction between computer and user, at worst.
However, not everyone is a Unix guru, and it takes a long time to become one. As a result, many people had trouble with the steep learning curve demanded by early Linux. At this point, a company called Red Hat Linux was founded, whose mission was to make money packaging Linux into a more user-friendly form. Their packaged version of Linux has become so successful, that to many people RedHat is now synonymous with Linux, despite the fact that there are now dozens of other packaged versions of Linux available.
Again, there is no irony in Red Hat (or anyone else) selling Free Software. Free isn't about price, it's about liberty. Anyone who buys RedHat Linux gets all the source code, too. They are still free to modify it, and to redistribute it, even to give it away to all their friends, if they like. At Redhat's own website, you can even download their entire distribution at no cost.
Now wait a minute. How can a company survive by selling something that can be obtained elsewhere for little or no cost?! It defies logic, doesn't it? Well, maybe not. After all, Starbucks is an extremely successful company despite the fact that, with a little effort, anyone can make their own coffee for a lot less money than Starbucks charges.
Like Starbucks, Redhat sells convenience and a recognized brand. Many people like having their Linux distribution on a couple of CDs, along with a nice manual. They also sell customer support. They have many, many paying customers, despite the fact that their product can be obtained easily at no cost.
Nobody owns Linux. Everybody owns Linux. Both of these statements are equally true. I suppose Linus comes closer to "owning" Linux than anyone else, for three reasons: (1) he invented the first version of the kernel; (2) the word "Linux" is a trademark registered to him; and (3) he is still the undisputed leader of kernel development...essentially all changes to the kernel must be met with his approval. However, this role as "head kernel hacker" is one bestowed on him by the unspoken will of the community.
If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: Linux is not a company, and it is not a commercial product. It is a worldwide community-developed operating system, owned by no one. The popular media almost always get this wrong, treating Linux as a mere business product.
No.
Microsoft has a monopoly in the computer operating system market (something like 90% of the computers in the world run some kind of MS operating system). Their core business strategy is to leverage this OS monopoly to force people and corporations to purchase their other software products (this strategy is both illegal and very successful, but that's another discussion).
Anything that threatens their OS monopoly is going to be potentially destructive to Microsoft's business. Typically, Microsoft deals with such threats by buying the competitor, or getting them to agree to quit competing somehow (witness IBM's OS/2 operating system).
However, in Linux, Microsoft finds itself facing an alternative OS that cannot be bought out, and cannot be bargained into going away. Despite the fact that only 1% of the world's computers currently use Linux, Microsoft has stated publically that they consider Linux to be their number one competitor.
So, if you're Microsoft, and you see a new competitor on your radar that can't be dealt with in your standard way, what do you do? What they are doing is taking the low road. Spreading all sorts of misinformation about Linux and the GPL, in an attempt to instill Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about Linux in the minds of their customers (Microsoft uses this strategy all the time, not just for Linux. They refer to it internally as using "FUD tactics" for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).
Today, Linux is arguably the most powerful consumer Operating System in the world. It is constantly being updated and improved by the international community of developers, almost all of whom are volunteers. Linux works on more different kinds of machines than any other OS. You can run it on a PC, Mac, Sun, Dec/Alpha, IBM Risc, Playstation 2; even on Palm Pilots and other handheld computers. It is now more user friendly than ever, although it is still quite a bit more challenging than Windows or Mac OS. Linux is becoming more and more the OS of choice for computing professionals. Compared to its proprietary competitors, it is more stable, more secure, more powerful, and Free. Since 1996, most web pages on the internet have been hosted on machines running the Apache Web Server, which is Free Software. Netcraft repeats their web server survey four times a year, and every time, they see a larger fraction of hosts running Linux.
For an inexperienced user, Linux can still present some big challenges. If you have non-standard hardware, or need to do something at the cutting edge, odds are you're going to wrestle with Linux. However, the time has come where if you are an average computer user, Linux provides at least two options for an easy, friendly point-and-click graphical user interface. These GUIs are called "Desktop environments". They represent graphical eye candy to hide a lot of the complexity of Linux from the user, and let you get what you need easily. If you are old enough to remember Microsoft Windows 3.1, it's exactly analogous to that program being the graphical abstraction layer on top of DOS. The first of these is called KDE (the K Desktop Environment), and the other is called GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment). For most purposes, the two are interchangeable; they were developed by two separate groups of volunteers to provide a friendly user interface for Linux. The competition between the groups has been friendly (for the most part). Like many somewhat-arbitrary choices, everyone has their preference, and defends it loudly (my personal preference is KDE; I really like their KOffice suite (similar to MS Office, but Free of course), and I like that they use C++ for development instead of C).