There are many ways to get microsoft products free, so what's the big deal with linux ?

2 Comments

1. Niklaus Pfirsig says:

   9. July 2011 at 22:01

   There a lot more to it. As some say, it free as in freedom, not necessarily free as in free beer. Windows is commercial-proprietary software. As long as Microsoft makes money by maintaining a monopoly, they have final say on what you can do with your computer. This is often controlled by addon functionality that requires you to give up legal rights to get service packs and upgrades.
   Even if you get it for free, every copy of Windows belongs to Microsoft. The source code, is held by Microsoft as a trade secret, the public is not allowed to know what may be hidden inside.
   Linux belongs to the public. If someone needs to add a specific functionality, the changes belong to the person that changes it. They can keep the changes, sell the changes, or enter the changes into a contest to possibly be included in the next release. The linux programmer’s incentive is to personally add value, the incentive for Windows programmers is to make the stockholders richer.
   Another big deal for linux is security. Several years ago, an astronomer named Clifford Stoll, stumbled onto an international espionage ring that was trying to gain access to nuclear research data at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. While working with federal and international police, Mr Stoll suggested many security enhancements to unix, all of which have been incorporated into Linux.
   The biggest deal with Linux is stability. Several years ago, the long distance phone system experienced a major cascade failure caused by a software upgrade on computers used for routing long distance calls. The cause was eventuall traced back to a typographic error in the original source-code for the upgraded software. Subsequent studies by the Department of Defense and by AT&T concluded that the best way to avoid software bugs was to have as many people as possible to proofread the source code. This is know as the "Many Eyes" approach to quality control. The source code for Windows is a legally protected trade secret. Outside of the programmer that worked on a piece of code, probably only 4 or 5 others have seen that part. With Linux, hundreds of thousands of programmers can read and analyse the source code. While Microsoft proponents argue that this makes it less secure because anyone can find a security hole, in practice, it really means that anyone with a bit of skill can fix the hole instead of hoping that the company will actually admit the hole was there in the first place.
2. 01101010 says:

   9. July 2011 at 22:01

   Sure there are ways to get "free" MS products, the illegal way. The big deal about Linux is Linux is open source, meaning anyone with the knowledge can customize Linux to their liking and bild their own distro. Linux is also a less likely to be a target for virus and spyware.