What I’ve learned from Linux

I’ve been involved/using GNU/Linux for at least five years now, off and on, and I’ve learned a lot from the Linux/Open Source/Free Software mentality. A lot of the things that I’ve learned are things that we learned as kids, but as we grew older, we soon forgot.

Probably the first lesson that I learned is that free doesn’t mean crappy. I think this is true for anything that people are giving away, be it software, movies, or religious views. A lot of people think that when somehting is free as in beer, they have permission to not put very much effort into it. For a little bit of background, I’m a Christian, and I’ve been a Christian for at least 7 years, and I’ve seen a lot of crap produced by the church, especially when it comes to media. When most people hear that something is going to be free, they think that means that whatever the product is going to be complete and utter crap. If you look at the success of of distributions, sush as Red Hat and Ubuntu, it is because they are easy to use, and they look pretty. When people make first impression sof things, it is based 90% on looks. If somebody is trying something out, and it looks like crap, they’ve already made up their mind about the product.

The second thing that I learned from Linux, isn’t really from Linux. I learned that just because something costs money, doesn’t make it good. There are hundreds of thousands of software products on the market for PC’s, and for most of the major ones, there is a free version available. While the free versions of software aren’t always the same quality as the software that is paid for, the free software usually has most if not all of the features that they average users use. For the larger programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and Autodesk Maya, there is at least one, possibly a few, instances of people working to make similar programs. And for the smaller programs, such as Yahoo Messenger and iTunes, there are dozens of projects made by people that, as the only payment, is people downloading the software. When something costs money, people have a piece of mind about it. They feel a sense of security when they pay for a box, instead of being able to download it for free. The point I’m really trying to make is that I shouldn’t have to pay for good software. If people want to pay someone for software in a box, they can. If somebody needs the software that comes in a box for their job, they should buy it. But for the other 95% of the population, they should just get a free and legal version of the software.

The third thing that I learned from Linux, is that sharing is good. When software is shared, it becomes infinitely better than when the software development is limited to a few software developers working for a company. I’m going to side with ESR on this one, he said, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” That is true for any problem that comes to mind. If you have enough people working on it, eventually is going to see what the problem is. People all look at things differently, even if it is just slightly different. With enough points of view, eventually the flaw in the system will be seen.

Linux has a lot to offer the world in more ways than just free/open source software. It has ideologies that should be adopted by every institution. These ideologies will take organizations farther, but the problem that we have now is the implementation. The thought of telling people to let other people help them is great, but how can we overcome the pride that everybody has?

~ by jakeneumann on August 26, 2008.