- that you have at home and
sharing your hard drives, CDROM(s), sound card(s), modem,
printer(s), etc.? How about browsing the net on two or more machines
at the same time using a single Internet connection? How about
playing a game with your son over your home network? Even your old
386 with MS Windows ver.3.11 may become useful again when connected
to your Linux Pentium server and when it is able to use your network
resources. All necessary networking software comes with standard
Linux, free, just setup is required. And it is not second-rate
shareware--it is exactly the same software that runs most of the
Internet (the Apache "web server" software runs 66% of all
Internet web servers and Sendmail touches some 70% of all e-mail).
The pleasure of home networking is something I was able to discover
only owing to Linux.
Connectivity to Microsoft, Novel, and Apple proprietary networking. Reading/writing to your DOS/MS Windows and other disk formats. This includes "transparent" use of data stored on the legacy MS Windows partition of your hard drive(s).
State-of-the-art development platform with many best-of-the-kind programming languages and tools coming free with the operating system. Access to all the operating system source codes, should you require it, is also free. The "C" compiler that comes standard with Linux can compile code for more platforms than (probably) any other compiler on earth. Perl, Python, Guile, Tcl, Ruby, powerful "shell" scripting, and even assembler tools also come as standard with Linux.
Freedom from viruses, "backdoors" to your computer, software manufacturer "features," invasion of privacy, forced upgrades, proprietary file formats, licensing and marketing schemes, product registration, high software prices, and pirating. How is this? Linux has no viruses worth mentioning because it is too secure an operating system for the viruses to spread with any degree of efficiency. The rest follows from the open-source and non-commercial nature of Linux: Linux evolved itself by "bazaar-like" mechanisms to encapsulate the best computing practices, code legibility and maintainablity, security, flexibility, usefulness, coolness, and performance. (The most important of these attributes is probably maintainablity.)
The operating platform that is guaranteed "here-to-stay." Since Linux is not owned, it cannot possibly be put out of business. The Linux General Public License (GPL) insures that development/maintenance will be provided as long as there are Linux users. There are a great number of highly-educated Linux users and tens of thousands of actively developed projects.
A platform which will technically develop at a rapid pace. This is insured by the modern, open-software development model which Linux implements: "build-on-the-back-of-the-previous-developer" and "peer-review-your-code" (as opposed to the anachronistic closed-software model: "always-start-from-scratch" and "nobody-will-see-my-code"). Even if the current "Linux hype" died out, Linux will develop as it did before the media hype started. Open source development does have its peculiarities: the development appears rather slow (vertically) but it proceeds on a very wide front, dangerous security bugs are fixed almost upon discovery, there are typically several alternatives for a program of similar functionality. Linux depth cannot be overestimated.
If you wanted to learn first-hand about the General Public License, check these famous GNU documents:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#TheGNUsystem
In a nutshell, the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) allows anybody to:
use the software at no charge, without any limitations,
copy, and distribute or sell unmodified copies of the software in the source or binary form,
use the software with propriatory (e.g., your own) modifications, free of charge, as long as you do not distribute or sell the modified
