This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.

Free as in beer

Ours is an OSX/Linux household, so you'll see me on this side of the track as well. :)

Linux, I think, has been so successful simply because it empowers people. It is due to have a huge success in third-world countries once internationalization gets to an effective level. It's free, it's very well-supported, it has a huge range of software, and the quality is impressive. By comparison with Windows, which is expensive, restricts software development and is really sloppy code, Linux shines.

Although there are various flavours of software running on Linux, the main thrust of the community is still for free software, "free as in beer". Free to develop, free to distribute, free to get, free to use.

For so many of us, it strikes a chord by removing barriers. Internationalization, for example, is very strong in this community, and the array of accessibility tools is top quality. Anyone can contribute to the Linux community worldwide, and although there are now several different distributions, desktop systems etc., the original aim of Linux Torvalds has remained uncorrupted, and has become an icon for the whole free software world.

You'd like program A to be slightly different? Join the development team, or write your own. You want a translation? Join the internationalization effort. You have a totally freaky idea nobody else has tried yet? It will be judged on its merits.

There is surprisingly little 'politics' in the free software world, and very little damage done by personal conflict and mailing list/forum brush fires. There are a great many dedicated and very able people committed to making it work, so it does. Linus was perceptive enough to see a real need for this world, and able enough to start meeting it. Fortunately, we weren't too stupid to pick it up. ;)

How many great ideas have been left rolling in the gutter? Too many. But not this one: we all have too much to gain from it.

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