History of Unix, Linux, and Open Source Software Form

Must have:(Arch) Linux itself!BSD is pretty cool tooLibreOffice office suiteCalligra Office for KDE/Qt and people who don't need to save to .docxGIMPOpenShot video editor (3-D titles with Blender)BlenderPlayOnLinux/PlayOnMac/Wine - POL/POM is my favorite frontend to the Windows compatibility later that is Wine. Though I don't use it much at all anymore, for some it is the thing the allows them to work without Windows installed.Firefox/Thunderbird - Mozilla's trusty browser and email client combo, honestly I liked them better before Australis but I still like them better than Chromium (bias)Palemoon/FossaMail - alternative programs based on the combo listed above. Some prefer these because of how Mozilla has changed themes and added "ads" in the new tab page.Syncthing - A much better self-hosted synchronization program than ownCloud, IMO. Works a lot like Bittorrent Sync, but is open source and awesome.AdAway - Android adblocker that edits the hosts file to redirect ad requests to local hostShadowHosts/pyHostsEditor - Scala/Python programs I am currently writing that do the same/similar thing as AdAway on desktop. Repositories at https://github.com/Shadow53 (I wouldn't mention except I actually make a point to use it on my computers, usually the python one as it is quicker. The Scala one will have more features in the future, however).F-Droid - open source Android app store that distributes only fully open source apps that they build themselves based on the source code.microG - An effort by XDA user MaR-V-iN to create an open source implementation of the Google Play services to replace the bloated, invasive proprietary/official onesOmniROM/BlissRom/Pure Nexus - all great Android ROMs (though Bliss can be a bit laggy), I currently run Omni on my Nexus 6Budgie DE for Linux - Possibly the best GTK desktop I've seen to date, certainly rivaling Cinnamon. Written by and for the Solus Project for the Solus Operating System. I use it on Arch due to the early age of Solus (awesome project, too few packages for me and currently missing a number that I use).KDE Connect - integrate Android with your (KDE) Linux desktop.BibleTime - my favorite desktop Bible software, I use it when I'm using my computer to do a bible study (personally, I prefer actual books for that)Outstanding:ReactOS, open source Windows NT clone - literally! It's being made to be binary compatible, with the goal to be a direct replacement without needing to use anything other than Windows .exes.OpenMW, open source Morrowind engineCMatrix - okay, all it does is make it look like there is matrix code tunning in your terminal, but it looks pretty awesome and some people thing you're hacking, which is a plus.microG - see above listOpenVPN - open source VPN program, unless you are using the official Android app, apparently. Still awesome.Just about anything in the "must have" list, really.

I was a little surprised that so many people tried to answer this question, circled around the answer, but really did not answer it correctly. Instead, some authors have fallen into the ‘popular’ (urban legend) style answer as opposed to what really happened. I realized that so much of the actual answer is because so many of the things that happened, occured at a time before many of you were on the scene (so I should not be surprised). In the interest of trying to get history right and having been a small-time protagonist / lived a bit of the drama, I’ll try to explain it as best I can and offer places for you to research and form some of your own opinions.The short answer which you have been given is that Linux is a current implementation of the UNIX ideas or trade secrets – which does makes it “UNIX” via the ‘Turing test’ – it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, even tastes like duck when you cook it. The US courts have actually defined this (even as Linux was being born as you will see). As was amply described by others, Linux is a rewrite of the UNIX ideas even though it is not wholly based on the original UNIX source code that was originally derived from AT&T. Please remember Linux is not the only rewrite of UNIX and is hardly the first. It is the most successful – see my answer to Would it be possible/advantageous to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust when the language is stable?The key point to remember here is that the UNIX ideas/trade secrets are open and ‘free.’ The source code (primarily C) to the original UNIX implementation while ‘open,’ was also ‘licensed’ and that license required a nominal fee for academics and larger ‘fair and reasonable’ one –for commercial folks (more in a minute).Thus, you are actually correct in that Linux is built on UNIX trade secrets but that is different from using the licensed implementation, which is what some folks seem to be getting excited. That said, we need to remember that the Linux source is also licensed. It turns out the terms of the Linux license (the GPLv2) has restrictions that require the user to make the sources of Linux available at no direct cost if some person asks you for them, instead of requiring that user to pay fees for them. This is the typical definition of ‘free’ as in ‘beer’ part of the “Free and Open Source Software.”As I like to say: The original UNIX implementation was and is Open Source Software which was different from many other commercial systems of the day. While Linux, and current other UNIX implementations such as current BSD implementations of UNIX are both ‘Free and Open Source Software.’Now that I’ve explained the end state, let’s look at what happened, why this so confusing to someone coming in from outside the UNIX/Linux community, and why it sometime gets a little contentious - particularly if you only know some of the history. Things like the SCO case et al. are fairly late in the game and are not actually the real basis for why Linux is ‘open’ – contrary to the belief of a lot of hackers (to be honest, I believed the same until I was suddenly educated in the early 1990s – more in a minute). It’s confusing but fascinating to consider the history.The real history here all goes back to an argument/legal entanglement between the US gov. and AT&T with the 1949 anti-trust suit (History of AT&T - Wikipedia) and “AT&T Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market” (John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical Law Journal, 303, September 1987, volume 2, issue 2, article.) The argument was settled with the 1956 ‘consent decree’ that had extremely important side effects for us in the computer and electronics businesses. Quote from Wikipedia here:In 1949, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit aimed at forcing the divestiture of Western Electric, which was settled seven years later by AT&T's agreement to confine its products and services to common carrier telecommunications and license its patents to "all interested parties." A key effect of this was to ban AT&T from selling computers despite its key role in electronics research and development. Nonetheless, technological innovation continued.My non-legal description of the decree is in return for granting AT&T a legal monopoly for the phone business in the USA, AT&T had to agree to a number of behaviors. One of them was they were not allowed to be in the computer business (and IBM was not allowed to compete with AT&T in the phone business either BTW), but the other was that all AT&T had to agree to continue to work with the academic research community and industry at large as it had done in the past, but must make all of its inventions available to the academic community at no charge and license them for ‘fair and reasonable terms’ – but remember all of those licenses were monitored by the US gov.The first major invention that we outside of AT&T got from the decree was the transistor. While it was invented in 1947 at Bell Telephone Laboratories (a.k.a. BTL or Bell Labs) in Murray Hill, NJ; clearly it was places like Fairchild Semiconductor, TI, Intel etc. that would make the money on the invention. We as consumers and as a society clearly have benefited greatly. AT&T simply had to the license the device (the transistor) to anyone and they did. In fact, AT&T had an office in Murray Hill called the patent and license group whose sole job was to write those licenses for firms that wanted them (side note – this is how UNIX got its start, as a word processing system for those same folks, but that’s a different story and described elsewhere).Key point #1 is that by the late 1960s, early 1970s when UNIX comes on the scene, AT&T is required by law to license its technologies to everyone and actually has processes and procedures to do just that.We know that over time the world’s largest and most complex computer system was being developed in the Bell System, the phone switching network; but remember, AT&T is not allowed to be in the computer business. However, doing computing research made perfect sense for them, given what they did build, since the core of telephone system was a computer. And as a side product of building the phone network, just like the transistor, another core technology started to be created by them, software and algorithms, which would of course lead to UNIX (but I’m ahead of myself). The Murray Hill team has PhD Mathematicians, Physicists, and others of said academic bend, that continue to publish papers about the ideas in the open literature describing those ideas which are quite different from all other computer systems being discussed at the time in the same places. They developed the code and ran it internally; just like they built transistors and used them, so their research was also ‘applied’ or in patent terms ‘reduced to practice.’ Note the original Ken and Dennis UNIX paper was published in: CACM July 74, Vol 17, No 7 Pages 365-375.So, by 1974 when they publish the UNIX paper, AT&T has a technology it is not allowed to directly sell, and in fact it is required to make the technology available to ‘all interested parties’ … but … because they have published about it and it drew outside interest, quickly the academic community starts asking about it. By the rules of the 1956 consent decree, AT&T was required to make it available to them. The Murray Hill Technology license office did so with the only fee being a ~$100 tape copying charge (which even was reported to have not been collected sometimes if you brought a disk to Ken and he copied the bits for you instead of mailing – a little known factoid). Anyway, the small fee covered what it cost AT&T to write and mail the tape. The key point is that if you were an academic institution it was extremely easy to get a license for UNIX and copies of the UNIX implementation from Ken and Dennis and many, eventually most, did.Note the description of code was ‘open’, as it was published in journals, papers and books, plus the sources themselves used to build the entire system were ‘freely shared.’ At the time, we had conferences and traded code back and forth. I was and am still part of that. In fact, I am a past President of USENIX Association that was created to make sure sharing of information easy USENIX Notes 2010 04 . It was very much what we now call the ‘open source culture’ as different groups modified the code. The most famous collection of modifications to the UNIX trade secrets became the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) from the EECS dept. at UC Berkeley (UCB) and distributed to their licensees (which of course all had an AT&T license).So here is where it gets a little messy and possibly hard for the modern user to understand. What has changed really is the economics behind the open source culture and the cost to be a member of the same. The real ‘barrier to entry’ to use UNIX was not the cost of the code, but the cost of the hardware to run it on. A smallish DEC PDP-11/40 class system such as an PDP 11/34 with max memory (256K bytes) would just barely suffice to run UNIX, but that was on the order of $50K-$150K after disk, tapes, etc. If you wanted a PDP 11/70 class system which could address as much as 4M bytes, it was closer to $250K. So another key point is that in those days, you did not own the hardware yourself, you used a system owned/operated by someone else.Even when a ‘commercial’ UNIX license was purchased, which added an additional $20K to the cost of the system, the real cost of a UNIX installation was the cost of acquiring the hardware to run it. I think this is issue is forgotten and is what tends to put some people off today when the history gets written. Having access to that kind of hardware was sometimes not quite so easy. Because the hardware cost was so expensive, you needed to be part of group that did. Most researchers were academics at Universities and that is where we tended to have access to the equipment.But not all universities were as liberal with access to the resulting system. This meant that easy access to the UNIX source code as it was at MIT, CMU or UCB in USA or Cambridge, Edinburgh, Vrije Universiteit (Netherlands), CERN or the like in Europe; was at many institutions not available. In fact, some academic institutions were known to be particularly difficult to get access to computing resources, particularly if you were an undergraduate in those days. A number of my friends about 10-15 year younger than I or some the same age from very large public institutions have expressed to me the difficulties they had trying to obtain access to the sources, and have they felt that in those days UNIX was a ‘club.’ I’ll accept that observation but you needed to be able to have access to the hardware to be part of the ‘sources club’ and not students all could, but once you met the hardware membership, the sources themselves were free and open and the IP (trade secret) always was available to anyone that could read English, even if you we not part of that ‘club.’My point here is that the cost of the installation was high due to the hardware cost not the software cost or its availablity, which is the opposite of today. Software and training to use the software is what most dominates the cost of a computing environment in today’s world (thank you Moore’s law).As a result of such high value for their computing facilities institutions often kept access to the UNIX source locked up at the local installation. It is this action that makes many current users claim UNIX was ‘closed’ and in fact if you were a developer at that time and did not have someone providing you access to hardware, chances were you as a developer were not going to see the software sources either. So, I’m sympathetic to the claim; although as I said, the problem was not with UNIX or its license, it was the economics of the time that different intuitions solved in different ways. (I personally, as did most system folks of those days, made sure I was employed by someone with a license, so it never really seemed to be an issue for me.)But the story is hardly over, for instance, Linux is not even on the scene yet! The courts make a huge change on January 1, 1984. AT&T is broken up; and with it the 1956 consent decree is abolished. So now the UNIX ideas become an interesting issue.AT&T has spent that last 10 years teaching the academic community about a different way to build computers. AT&T has demanded its supplier (DEC) support the AT&T technology in its product for them. Their own employees have been the primary authors of numerous text books on different techniques, from compilers to how UNIX itself was built! Companies have been formed to build systems to run just their technology. In today's, vernacular, UNIX has gone ‘viral’ and has a bit of a life of its own.So by the First of January 1984 the difference between the UNIX ideas and UNIX source code implementation start to become acute. Is UNIX the C source code or is UNIX the ideas that Ken and Dennis wrote about in 1974? This is the crux to your own question, why it is confusing, and why so many people get it wrong.At the time, the hacker community, of which I was a part, answered the question ‘it was the C sources that we got from AT&T that said ‘Copyright AT&T …’ mumble’. The belief (urban legend) was that as long as we did not use any code from AT&T, we were not using AT&T’s ideas (boy, were we wrong – but I digress again).Part of the problem was some legal precedent has been set in the 1970s, both concerning sources, and publication. Apple had published the sources to the BIOS for the Apple-II computer in its user manual, which was in fact common for computers in the day. A Philadelphia company, Franklin Computer, created an Apple-II ‘clone’ and by retyping the source and making a few small changes, created a new binary image BIOS for their own product. The original sources were copyright by Apple, but the question for the US courts was did the copyright protect the binary results in the ROM or just the code on the paper in the book? Apple sued and won Apple vs Franklin - Wikipedia. Around the same time, IBM has also published the sources to its BIOS for the IBM PC, so when Compaq and other later PC clone vendors appeared, the solution developed had been to take two teams. One team was ‘dirty’ and read the IBM source BIOS listing, but wrote function descriptions of the contents. A ‘clean’ team which never saw the actual IBM code, took the functional descriptions and implemented a new BIOS. Then example user code was tested against both the IBM and clone BIOS and it was repeated until the same behavior was obtained with BIOS implementations.Thus, from two cloning experiences, there was an agreed upon model in the computing business of how to create something that some had a defined “copywrite” – take an existing specification of the sources, ensure that the none of your actual developers (the actual writers of the code) were never able to see the original copywritten source and become a ‘clean room team’ using the functional descriptions generated by the first team (dirty team) and second team can build the new system from the specs alone. This will have important implications for UNIX (and Linux and another other clone – in a minute).In fact, the scheme was so popular firms popped up to do just that. I was a Sr. Scientist at Locus Computing, which was the premier UNIX consulting house in the 80s and 90s doing exactly this type of work for the usual firms. We had large numbers of people, I was personally always on a ‘dirty team’ (which will be obvious in a minute).Also besides all of the academic work happening with UNIX, as I said, there is a huge UNIX industry that has been born. One of the things that occurs is that there are efforts both inside and out of AT&T to define what the ‘ideas’ behind UNIX really are. The first successful version was the November 1984 /usr/group standard which defined UNIX officially for the first time. Two years later it would be replaced by IEEE P1003 POSIX [note, I was a member of both groups]. I believe that the current standard is: IEEE Std 1003.1-2008, 2016 Edition and Single UNIX Specification, Version 4, 2016 Edition. Also, note that shortly after the original P1003 standard was published the US gov. started creating its own definition of UNIX called FIPS 151, which by today has degenerated into a testing suite for POSIX conformance, see Validation Services for Federal Information Processing Standard 151-2. The key point here is that AT&T originally created UNIX, but clearly if we inside and out are all arguing about what it is, the ideas our now outside of AT&T too!So, let’s review the world in the late 1980s, early 1990s when any bright hacker is given access to Intel 386 based PC and wants to run UNIX on it:UNIX has been created by AT&T and the ideas published in the early 1974 in open literature.AT&T was required to make the UNIX ideas available and has, with now many thousands of source licenses around the world.AT&T employees have published in open literature, via books, etc. many ideas that make up UNIX including the core UNIX interfaces.An industry has been born around the UNIX technology, with a lot of firms producing products based on the ideas.IEEE has published a formal definition of the UNIX ideas.Besides the original AT&T UNIX implementation, there are a number of other implementations now in the ‘wild’ from Idris to Coherent which were written in C. Mach and Minix, were are also in C but use microkernels adding new technology, an implementation in Pascal (French SOL project), which would later become the C++/Chorus implementation just to name a few.There are also a ton of system modifications done based on the original work from Research, from Universities around the world such as CMU, MIT, Cambridge … but the version from the UC Berkeley, a.k.a. BSD clearly has a huge following and runs on just about all types of mainstream HW by the 1990s, including the Intel 386.Numerous companies are building UNIX based product, too many to name but Microsoft, IBM, DEC and at this point even AT&T themselves are a few.The team at UCB realize that their code no longer has any code left in from AT&T. As hackers, we all believed that since we no longer had code that contained an AT&T copywrite, we were not bound by the AT&T license. Some of the BSD team formed a company, called BSDi, and began to market a version of BSD UNIX that could run on a 386 based PC, starting with the BSD code and some work described in a series of DDJ articles Porting Unix to the 386: the Basic Kernel [Again, full disclosure, I helped Bill debug the original disk interface and am referenced in the articles.]It turns out getting access to the 386BSD distribution from UCB was extremely easy for any BSD licensee. It was officially available for FTP download and many licenses did grab the images – it was a very well known ‘secret’ address that was passed by word of mouth hacker to hacker.Life was good, for about $1500 you could purchase a fairly reasonable computer that had graphics, networking etc… running BSD UNIX and it was your own. Remember, this is different from before where the computer was owned by someone else. Also, the truth is if Linus had known about the FTP site, since his University was licensed for the 386BSD code; Linus could have downloaded it. However, he didn’t know about the ‘secret’ FTP site and he did have a copy of Minix, but he discovered that Minix in those days was a toy compared to BSD – so he wrote his own OS; while many of the rest of hacked on 386BSD.As I said life was good for us in 386BSD land … until … well AT&T decides to sue BSDi and UC Berkeley, see court docs from USL vs BSDi.So, a number of us hacker types get scared, we think it’s a suit based on copyright protection and 386BSD is going to go away – UNIX ‘source’ is not ‘free’ as in beer. We hear about this system that sort of works, no networking, no graphics, but it uses the 386 VM hardware and we start hacking (the rest is history). The key is that Linus has used all those materials I described above that are ‘open’ and has built a respectable clone of the UNIX ‘ideas’. He gives his sources away, asking for help, he gets it. We all help him make it better and the story ends right…But here is where we (the hackers) were wrong. The AT&T/USL suit was not about copyright, the suit was about trade secrets. AT&T is suing that UNIX is an idea, it is not about a specific implementation. If they are win, it means all of the UNIX ‘clones’ needed to be licensed!!!And in the end the US courts agreed, AT&T invented it, AT&T can define it. It’s AT&T trade secret … but …(nasty but …)The problem was that all us folks had been educated with the UNIX technologies and ideas. The court’s term for it was we were ‘mentally contaminated’ when we saw AT&T sources and read their papers. Moreover, folks like Linus and folks that build clones were contaminated with the ideas when they read books or read the POSIX specification. The point is, UNIX was a technology and an idea, but it was no longer a secret the moment they licensed it and AT&T could not claim it be.Which is an interesting ‘catch-22.’ AT&T was required by the 1956 consent decree to license its technologies to interested parties. So how could it have trade secrets? – good Quora question.An interesting aside, another question for the Quora readership might be what would have happened if AT&T had won the ruling, could it still be classified as secret and BSDi and UCB in violation? What would/could have happened to Linux/Minix and all the other clones [I’ve asked some legal friends and they said it would have been messy and lots of lawyers would have made money.]Ok, so BSDi/UCB wins, BSD is allowed to be ‘free’ as in beer, UNIX ideas are now legally defined as ‘unlicensed’ for us all to use, you would think it was over, settled. Of course, it was not, because while BSD was caught up in legal limbo, the hacker community moved on and ‘Linux was the bomb.’At this point, Linux is the premier UNIX implementation and is where much of the primary work is going. But what about that nasty SCO thing folks mentioned? Well of course it was not clear at the beginning that Linux would ‘win’ the copyright case, and SCO (who had the Microsoft UNIX assets of many years earlier when Microsoft got out the UNIX business) clearly wanted to try slow Linux down in some manner and/or reap some type of royalty from it by demonstrating that somehow some of copyrighted UNIX technology had made it into Linux.This time the case was about copyright, but I’ve often wondered how the SCO lawyers could ever have thought they had any chance with it given the results of the USL case. The US court had already decided, UNIX is a technology and set of ideas, it was originally a trade secret but no longer. AT&T and any whomever (which the courts I believe eventually decided was Novell) owned the ideas, but no claims could be made against the original ideas. They were published.Others have discussed this case, so I’m not going to spend much time on it, although it was important in that is seems to have finally closed the lid, as I have not heard any other legal dances of importance to the UNIX community since.You asked a seemly simple question and got an old man’s long winded answer, but I hope you see that what seems simple has some very deep rooted complexity and may not be everything that it seems. The good news is that all of the UNIX technologies are open and have been open since their inception. The primary implementations are now free as in beer too which is even better. In closing, if you want to examine the technology, I suggest reading two more of my Quora answers: Clem Cole answers: Which Linux kernel version's source code is better for newbie to read? , Clem Cole answers: How would Unix run on modern-day systems? , and then going to The Unix Heritage Society and their UNIX Source Tree Page.Someone asked me in the hall ‘what about the UNIX trademark’ – you never talked about. The reason was because in this case today it is pretty much irrelevant (that was not always true). So, I’ll add it as a closing note. Yes, there is a formal mark about what is UNIX and to be allowed to use the mark you must meet the definition of POSIX as defined by OpenGroup and complete their tests. That is a branding thing and at one time it mattered when you were trying to market your system and we used different processors and your firm was trying to find both unique differentiation and value. At one point Microsoft even made sure that Windows could meet the ‘POSIX compliant’ label and be sold as a version of UNIX - Clem Cole's answers: Is Windows POSIX compliant? Today Windows 10 actually includes a complete Linux subsystem (and repositories from Ubuntu), that you just have to turn on – go figure.Edited 2017-08-14 to fix a few typos and some of my dyslexia. Apologies– to the reader. And added the Locus reference after reminder by a friend of mine, as well as the UNIX trade mark comment. Tweaked again at the suggestion of Páll Haraldsson - many thanks for fixing the typos. Tweaked again 2017–12–15 at the request of Tom Dufall where I also added some clarity on some questions that have come to me independently.

Yes. This is exactly what happens with most Wifi gateways and consumer Internet routers. They’re essentially a bundle of proprietary code running on top of Linux, shipped inside of a chunk of hardware.Nearly all consumer home routers run a variant of Linux as the base OS, and the source code for that and any extensions are available for download per Linux’s GPL license.However, the router code is usually a blend of proprietary code and open source libraries running on top of Linux. A NetGear router will run proprietary NetGear code, and that will be licensed under a proprietary NetGear EULA and not available as open source.

There's a lot of flavours of Linux. I'm providing the link to the source code of top 5 according to do Distrowatch: Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) Daily Build.Linux Mint(Clone that from github).Debian -- Details of package linux-source-2.6.32 in squeezeDebian Developers' CornerSource code - openSUSERepository Listing: Mageia.Though maybe you don't like any of these, and in that case a simple googling will pop out a lot more answers. And some distros have a really complicated source organisation. Not all of them are like OpenSUSE, which is probably most accessible source repo.

Because when Satya Nadella took over the company, he completely changed its focus and business model. Linux is so pervasive in enterprise computing these days that any company wanting to compete in that market segment pretty much has to accept Linux as a fact of life.Linux has 67 percent of the market on Web servers, 100 percent on supercomputers, 28 percent on mainframes (the rest is standard UNIX), and 71 percent on mobile devices (Android is Linux-based).If your business model includes being a provider of cloud-based solutions for enterprise customers, you have to support Linux. And if you’re Microsoft, it makes sense to be on the inside, with a voice in the future development of the kernel and supporting software, than it does to be on the outside looking in.

Just to start with a clarification, in general, Unix is not open source. However, there is an open source version of Unix, but it is nowhere near as popular as Linux.Now back to the question, first let’s look at the major highlights of a Linux OS and then see why the majority (of common users) prefer the Windows or Mac OS.Outstanding features of a Linux distribution:Freedom. It provides freedom to it’s end users for a level of customization unparalleled by any other OS.Control. It gives you more control over it’s processing. No more annoying background tasks eating away your time.Power. If harnessed, it can be more powerful than any OS on the same machine.Virus-free (almost). You would rarely, if not never, see a Linux user running an anti-virus in his machine. (Android would be an exception here)After all the above, why would one prefer Windows or Mac? The following are the main reasons:Stability. It is a common (mis)conception Linux distros are not that reliable when it comes to stability.Legacy. People who have been using Windows and Mac from the early ages prefer not to switch. People who rely on MS Office tools used for decades would not prefer switching to a different Office package.Advertising. When was the last time you see an advert for a Linux distro? Microsoft and Apple are very aggressive when it comes to advertising and it really does create a huge impact. Most business-oriented softwares (Office package, pro music synthesizers, graphics application, games etc.) are provided in these platforms confining them against using Linux.User-friendliness. Now this is a matter of perception, but many may find the bulk facilities offered by Linux to be overwhelming. Furthermore, Windows and Mac OS are more forgiving when it comes to user mistakes. And for a common user, installing even a simple software could give headaches in a Linux OS.So accounting all of the above, most people don’t mind the trade-off in power and go for a more (seemingly) reliable closed-source alternative, the Windows or the Mac OS.Personal Experience:Previously, I used Windows for everything right from the 98, XP and 7 (lost hope after 8). Then when I moved on to research, I was introduced to the Linux OS. I was first intrigued by it’s customizable features and later used it purely for its power and efficiency. I moved from Fedora (2 years) to Ubuntu (2.5 years) and planning to take on Arch in future. However, I still use a Mac for my daily work and paper-writing (3 years+) and still use a Windows XP virtual machine just for MS Office (I still can’t let go of it).I’m pretty much secular when it comes to OS usage. I use an OS for what it offers and do not rely on a single one for everything.

The Linux kernel started out as a pet project of Linus Torvalds. He developed and distributed Linux for free, as opposed to Microsoft. He did this while he was a student, he wasn’t after making money at all. He also has stocks at several companies, and he is sponsored by the Linux Foundation $10m/year. Same for other senior developers of the Linux Kernel. They are either sponsored or they get lots of donations. Either way, it’s good for the Linux community :)If you’re talking about the developers at RedHat, well..RedHat has many versions of Linux. Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE are all free. However, RedHat also has a premium version of their Linux distro called RHEL(RedHat Enterprise Linux), obviously targeted at enterprises. It’s a big source of income for them. They use this money to pay their developers.If you’re talking about Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, they have their sources of income too. Even though Ubuntu is open-source and completely free to distribute, they earn from support services (by selling Landscape, working with OEMs like Dell, working with Google for their chromebooks, selling physical Ubuntu-branded items, and closed sourced projects wishing to use Launchpad.net), and donations. Even though it’s not a lot of money, it’s enough to pay the developers considering that much of the development is actually done by people working in their spare time, and not Canonical :)Most other Linux distributions are smaller projects based on the major distributions(Linux Mint, Kubuntu, etc) and actually developed by people in their free time. Sometimes they recieve donations but that’s all. But hey isn’t that the concept of free and open-source software, on which Linux is based?Thank you for reading :)Comments are welcome.P.S. Typing this from my Ubuntu laptop :D

Free photo editing programs are sprouting all over the place. There’s a great variety of them now, from very basic tools to a advance tool like Photoshop. Even if you are a pro using a fully-featured, paid photo editor like Photoshop, it still pays to be familiar with these online photo editor free options to use when away from home.Here are some top free photo editor to download:AviaryPhotoshop ExpressGIMPSnapseedFotorPhotoScape XPixlrCanvaBefunkyGoogle PhotosiPiccyReference: The Top 15 Free Online Photo Editors

They’re exactly the same, in terms of the spectrum of talent of programmers who work on either or both, the degree of rigour and quality and documentation they bring to it, and the propensity of both to contain security vulnerabilities that are exploited by white-, grey-, and black-hat hackers without discrimination for either.Open-Source has the benefit that, if you have the skills or access to the skills, you can take it change it to suit your needs.