In 1994, a 29 year-old programmer from the University of Helsenki in Finland named Linux Torvalds designed an operating system that he named Linux as a hobby.
He distributed Linux to his friends and his friends gave it to their friends and so on. Linux got a lot of suggestions on how he could improve Linux. He took the suggestions and improved how Linux worked. As Linux got bigger and better more people started to use it.
It was wide spread across the University. Torvalds made Linux open source so that if someone wanted to program Linux to there needs they could. Linux then became wide spread across the world. Many people are now trading in Windows for Linux. “The increasingly vocal freeware community has championed Linux as a real, viable alternative to Microsoft Corp. ‘s Windows and NT for years.
Linux is freeware unlike Windows, which you pay a fair bit of money for. Mary Jo Foley is suggesting that because Linux is freeware then it will do better then Windows. There is nothing wrong with Windows as a operating system, Linux will do better then Windows because Microsoft has been on top for many years and a lot of people are getting sick of it so they are getting Linux. Windows is not always the best solution. If you want to use an old PC as router you’re probably better off with a one disk Linux distribution which does just that.
Performance of Linux in many cases is better too. There are probably many other scenarios where Windows is not a good choice. In a huge server cluster with dozens of processors you probably don’t want to run Windows because of it’s licensing costs, Linux doesn’t have all that. A problem with Windows is that it’s closed source, if you find a problem with the OS you can only rely on documentation you can’t dive into the code to see what goes wrong.
It’s a black box, you don’t have this problem in Linux, this is seen as a big advantage of Linux. You could wonder how many Linux users actually would ever reas source code. A very good thing of Linux is that it’s competing Windows, something Windows users benefit from too. Windows Server 2000 costs over $1000. The comparable edition of 2003 is around $670. Prices are dropping, which is a good thing.
But anyways its a peoples choice which operation system to use.
