1.6.2. Linux—An Open-Source Operating System

The Linux operating system is perhaps the greatest success of the open-source movement. Open-source software departs from the proprietary software development style that dominated software’s early years. With open-source development, individuals and companies contribute their efforts in developing, maintaining and evolving software in exchange for the right to use that software for their own purposes, typically at no charge. Open-source code is often scrutinized by a much larger audience than proprietary software, so errors often get removed faster. Open source also encourages innovation. Enterprise systems companies, such as IBM, Oracle and many others, have made significant investments in Linux open-source development.

Some key organizations in the open-source community are the Eclipse Foundation (the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment helps programmers conveniently develop software), the Mozilla Foundation (creators of the Firefox web browser), the Apache Software Foundation (creators of the Apache web server used to develop webbased applications) and SourceForge (which provides tools for managing open-source projects—it has hundreds of thousands of them under development). Rapid improvements to computing and communications, decreasing costs and open-source software have made it much easier and more economical to create a software-based business now than just a decade ago. A great example is Facebook, which was launched from a college dorm room and built with open-source software.

The Linux kernel is the core of the most popular open-source, freely distributed, full-featured operating system. It’s developed by a loosely organized team of volunteers and is popular in servers, personal computers and embedded systems. Unlike that of proprietary operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s OS X, Linux source code (the program code) is available to the public for examination and modification and is free to download and install. As a result, Linux users benefit from a community of developers actively debugging and improving the kernel, and the ability to customize the operating system to meet specific needs.

A variety of issues—such as Microsoft’s market power, the small number of user-friendly Linux applications and the diversity of Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu Linux and many others—have prevented widespread Linux use on desktop computers. Linux has become extremely popular on servers and in embedded systems, such as Google’s Android-based smartphones.