Why Open Source Community is Highly Satisfied with Linux
The last year I was reading a very informative book named “The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age” from Pekka Himanem. This book is a historical description about the philosophies and thinking of hackers as individuals and as a community. Himanem describes how he was preparing a conference where Manuel Castells (compared with Adam Smith and Marx is a remarkable writer about cyberspace and knowledge society) and Linus Trovald (the creator of the Operating System Linux) had a speech to talk about topics related to their respective professions. Himanem says that hackers have a different way of thinking based in solidarity community work. Probably that’s why Linux is strong and its developer community highly satisfied.
In my opinion Linus Trovald never knew what he had on his hands even though he has the honor to be the precursor of a great movement. Furthermore we can’t talk about Linux and Open Source Community without talking about Richard Stallman. This guy seems to be the real owner of Linux even he is the most important leader of the Open Source Movement and the Founder of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman represents the free software made a man. He represents the proud of a community of hackers of the 70s in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developing open software and sharing its code.
Open Source community is proud of Linux because they are filling the earth not only with a high quality and competitive operating system. Also they preaching their purpose and applying their philosophy of life in community. For instance I don’t have my own version of Windows XP but with a group of programmers I am able to have my own version of Linux. I can modify the code ethically. I am free to share the code modified. I can distribute it freely at no cost if desire it. And the most important I will able to benefit the most quantity of people doing that.
On the other hand the Open Source community is proud of Linux and feels comfortable with the thousands of experienced users they have around the world. The proprietary software such Microsoft has a lot of trained IT professionals around the word in different areas such as Database Administration, Software Developing and others but those professionals can’t use the source code of Microsoft and fix the bugs and errors that all the operating system versions released by Microsoft.
