Linux and Open-Source

Ask someone the definition of open-source software and you’d probably get many answers. “It’s free software.” “It’s software nobody owns.” “That Firefox thing, it’s open source, right?” Open-source is all of those things, but the key is that its development community is potentially far greater than even the largest commercial company’s. Don’t like the way something works, or find a bug? You can submit code and fix it, just like that. Don’t know how to code? You can still report bugs, with the knowledge that you will get a response from a real person who is actually involved with the development of the software. Yet does this lack of decentralization and financial support yield poorer-quality software?

I’m no stranger to the OSS scene, having played with Firefox ever since .5 and Linux before that. I started with Mandrake Linux way back in 1999, and sampled Red Hat and Fedora, SuSE and Ubuntu. I’ve run dual-boot systems on and off for years, but installed SuSE Linux 9.1 late in 2004 and still have it now. I felt that talking about some of the best… and worst… parts of this distribution might help lower the barrier for some of you to give it a go.

Rather than stepping through an installation or talking about features in specificity, I’ve decided to simply discuss some common questions or objections to Linux, as coming from my experiences.

Dewdles by Sam