Introduction

Much of the internal debates that range in the Open Source/Free Software communities, range about the licenses used to distribute software and Operating Systems. There are two main factions when it comes to Linux;

As you will see from the section below the main difference between these two organisations is their motivation for developing the software that is released under a license that allows freedom to modify, copy and redistribute the code.

Richard M Stallman started the Free Software Federation in 1984, yet that is not where our story starts.

When Stallman started work in the MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1971, he found a community of developers who shared software that they had written with each other, other learning institutes and companies. As Stallman indicates on the FSF website, the sharing of software was not new or unique to the MIT AI Laboratory community, it is as old as computers. Just as cooking recipes are shared, so were software applications.

In the early 80's the MIT hacker community started to disintegrate, a new computer system (a PDP-10) with a proprietary Operating System that hastened the collapse of the AI Lab community. To work with the software on the new system, Stallman had to sign a Non-disclosure agreement with the company who created the PDP-10. Bear in mind that this was to use the executable files for the software, these are not human readable, one needs the Source Code of the application to truly understand what it does, how it does this, without this it is nearly impossible to modify an application to better suit your needs.

Stallman was not willing to accept an agreement that would mean that he would not be able to help his fellow developers, he saw it as actively hindering other people from being able to do their work. Stallman tells of an incident that occurred to him while he was working in the AI Lab in MIT, where the software that they used to control their printer in the lab, lacked a few key features. Stallman was refused access to the source code for the printer's program because the company who created the printer and its software did not want to allow anybody to see how it worked. They did this by having their developers sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Stallman had to make a decision to either become one of the developers who were forced not to help each other or to stop developing or to devise a way where he would be able to recreate a community where people helped each other to develop better applications. He realised that he would first need a free Operating System, as without an Operating System computers cannot function. This was a very brave step, designing a new Operating System is no small effort.

Stallman had made the decision to develop a free Operating System on 27 September 1983. He decided to design it so that it would be compatible with Unix, then the most stable and widely used Operating System, so that Unix users could easily use it, and so that applications could be easily transferred to the new Operating System (a process referred to as 'porting').

Following a Hacker tradition which uses recursive acronyms, the term GNU (pronounced "guh-noo") was born. This stands for GNU is Not Unix.

Stallman started by developing a compiler, compilers are used to change the human-readable Source Code into Machine code. The Operating System needs this machine code to be able to run applications. This proved difficult to do and in reality it took him a few years to complete the compiler.

Stallman decided to work on a text editor, which he called GNU Emacs. Many people started to take an interest in Emacs and wanted to use it. He released GNU Emacs on a FTP server, but not everybody had access to the Internet, this was 1985 remember. To get his Emacs to the people who wanted to use it Stallman started a software distribution company that would mail people copies of the software for a small fee. This was a precursor to the many businesses that exist today that make a profit by redistributing Linux.

People started to join Richard Stallman in creating the GNU system in 1985, to fund their work they founded the Free Software Foundation, a tax-exempt charity that would create funds by distributing the software that the GNU had created.

By the time Linus Torvalds started working on his Operating System Kernel in 1991, the Free Software Federation had already written or helped to write a wide range of software distributed as Free Software.

Linus Torvalds was a student of the University of Helsinki when he announced on the 25th of August 1991 that he was busy developing a free Operating System.

At the time the only Operating System that made its source code available was MINIX. An Operating System developed by Professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum to teach his students the inner workings of an OS. MINIX was very limited and could only work on hardware based on the Intel 8086 framework. MINIX was also not Open Source, it had to be licensed, though the Source Code was available to licensed users. When Linus Torvalds started working on the kernel that would become Linux it was the start of the Internet boom, and Linus quickly got help from developers around the world, debugging the code and offering solutions to issues they found.

The Linux kernel was released under the GNU GPL License. Which allowed anybody to download the source files, modify them and use them in their own projects.

The Internet boom allowed many people to continue work on the project; new versions of the kernel were released often (sometimes even weekly). This had a number of benefits, perhaps the most notable is the fact that the kernel improved significantly in a very short period of time, another is that with this many releases it appealed to a wide range of users; those that wanted to be on the leading edge and worked on the development used the latest version of the kernel, whilst those want more stability used older versions. The Linux Kernel grew in popularity quickly.

The GNU has been working on its own kernel for some time now. It is called the GNU HURD.

The official definition for HURD is:

Its is believed that it will be released very soon (since it is Free Software you can already download and use it but it is not yet ready to be used in a production environment)

Eric S. Raymond is the president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI)

Raymond was involved in Unix and Open Source development for the GNU before Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel, which made him used to the Cathedral style of development, small teams working closely together on a project and only releasing the application once it was close to perfection.

Torvald's methodology of development (releasing early and often, delegating as much of the work as possible and being open to almost all suggestions) seemed strange to Raymond.

Raymond wanted to learn why the model used in the development of Linux worked so well, and he worked hard to learn more about it. In 1996 he had the chance to apply Linus's methods in a project he had just started. He needed an email client that would allow him to automatically download email from the community Internet Service Provider he had helped to start. Raymond had tried a few of the existing client applications, but none did exactly what he wanted it to do, so he did what all good hackers do, he decided to develop a new POP client. This was the perfect opportunity for him to also test the bazaar style of development. The application that was developed is called fetchmail and is still used extensively today.

In CatB Raymond lists 19 reasons why he believes the Bazaar development model works well.

“I will discuss these, as I understand them.” Riaan Bredenkamp

Linux and Free Software must be a marketer's nightmare, Linux is perceived to be an Operating System used only by highly technical people, who hardly ever leave their homes or offices. Worse, the people who develop Linux call themselves hackers, so how do you sell a product to companies when people think that only 'uber'-geeks can use it, and that they use it to break into bank accounts via the Internet?^[20]The truth of the matter is that home users and more importantly CEO's (Chief Executive Officer) and CTO's (Chief Technology Officers) have the perception that Linux is difficult to use and that would not be possible to use it in their environment.

When you examine how Microsoft has marketed their products and compare that to the way Linux as been marketed to the world, one begins to understand why Windows is the Operating System of choice, instead of Linux.

Traditionally Linux has been marketed to the business world, from the bottom up. Since it was only the technical people who knew about Linux, and how to use it, they were the people telling their bosses about how stable and cost-effective it is compared to the products offered by Sun, IBM or Microsoft. Unfortunately few technically minded people are also good businessmen, or know how to communicate their ideas to people who have the power to make decisions that will affect the company.

Microsoft, arguably the most successful software company around today, has marketed their products to the Chief Executive Officers, Chief Technology Officers and Chief Financial Officers. Not to the people who would use it, but rather the people who may not necessarily have the knowledge required to make a sound technical decision, but the people who are able to make financial decisions.

When deciding whether or not to use Linux in a business environment, one needs to make a distinction between an Operating System for a server, and an Operating System for a desktop. Whilst all Linux proponents would agree that it is very well suited to the server environment, some would say that when it comes to desktop systems, meant to be used as workstations, Linux may not yet be polished enough to replace Microsoft's products. Though, recent versions from SUSE and Red Hat are very close to being perfect for the desktop.

For Linux to gain more acceptance in the Business world, it will need to be marketed in the correct way.

CEO's would need to be made aware of why Linux is a viable option to use in the business environment, which is what the next section attempts to highlight. I will not be able to turn you into a marketer , or a business person, but I will attempt to list the reasons why Linux should be used.

Surely this is one of the main draw cards that Linux has over its competitors. During the IT industry boom in the late 1990', Information Technology seemed to promise unbelievable growth in profits and productivity. After the .com bust in 2000 many companies have slashed their IT budgets drastically. IT just did not deliver what it promised.

Today, businesses want even more out of the IT infrastructure, but they are more cautious when it comes to spending. Unlike the products from companies like IBM and SUN, Linux can run on almost any hardware architecture, you can use Linux to run your file server using the normal Pentium/AMD architecture. Of course it can run on other more obscure architectures, you can even run it on a Xbox gaming system. (Though that is not so strange once you know that the Xbox is just an IBM PC that is meant to be used for gaming exclusively. visit this page for more information on how to install Linux on a XBox) What is impressive is that people are creating clustered computer systems from these 'hacked' Xboxes. They are using the Xbox, because it uses good-quality hardware, is relatively inexpensive and is very quiet.

There are Linux distributions like Red Hat Fedora, Debian, and Gentoo that you can use completely free of charge, and there are distributions that require the user to purchase a license, for example Red Hat Enterprise 3 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 8. The advantage of buying a license is that you get support from the company who has created the Linux Distribution, including regular security updates and bug fixes. With the distributions that are free of charge, you depend on the community of users of that distribution for the security updates and bug fixes. Admittedly, this is a very enthusiastic community and these fixes are made available before most people know that they exist, but this is not a risk that many companies are willing to take. They would rather pay somebody for guaranteed service than depend on no-cost services.

Free Software is renowned for its stability, which translates to better uptime (the time between rebooting the system). Many commercial web-hosting companies use Free Software to run their servers, and to deliver the pages to Internet users.

Security is another reason why businesses would benefit from switching to Linux. Every year millions of dollars are lost worldwide by damage caused by Trojans, worms and viruses that affect Microsoft products. These programs exploit features in Microsoft that (it seems) Microsoft is unwilling to fix, since it would mean that Microsoft loses some of its ease of use. In Linux a much stricter security policy is implemented than on Microsoft Windows. In Linux the root user needs to allow any and all programs that want to run on the system. This can only be done by the root user (the administrator of a Linux machine).

In Microsoft systems, programs are allowed to run without any input from the user. In other words a malicious program can install itself on a Microsoft system, and run itself without the user of that system even knowing about it.

A classic joke: "Heard about the Linux virus? It works on the honor system. First it asks you to please e-mail it to all your friends, then it asks you to please log back in as root so it can tell you how to trash your system."^[21]

As discussed earlier, Linux is based on the Unix system, which has been used by enterprises since the early 1980's. With the release of version 2.6 of the Linux Kernel early in 2004 Linux has evolved even further.

(Joseph Pranevich has written an exhaustive analysis of what capabilities the latest Linux kernel bring to the Linux Operating System, read it at: http://www.kniggit.net/wwol26.html It is also included in the appendix Appendix B)

Now that IBM and Novell have thrown their weight behind Linux, one can no longer say that there isn't a major company who will make support available for Linux servers and workstations. Many businesses would rather pay a license fee and be sure that support for their IT infrastructure is just a phone call away.

On the 13th of January 2004 Novell finalised its acquisition of SUSE Linux ,Press Release and this means that there is now a multi-billion dollar company offering support for Linux on an Enterprise level, from servers to workstations.