Читать книгу Linux Bible - Christopher Negus - Страница 19

If you are new to Linux, chances are good that you have used a Microsoft Windows or MacOS operating system. Although MacOS had its roots in a free software operating system, referred to as the Berkeley Software Distribution (more on that later), operating systems from both Microsoft and Apple are considered proprietary operating systems. What that means is the following:

 You cannot see the code used to create the operating system, and therefore, you cannot change the operating system at its most basic levels if it doesn't suit your needs, and you can't use the operating system to build your own operating system from source code.

 You cannot check the code to find bugs, explore security vulnerabilities, or simply learn what that code is doing.

 You may not be able to plug your own software easily into the operating system if the creators of that system don't want to expose the programming interfaces you need to the outside world.

You might look at those statements about proprietary software and say, “What do I care? I'm not a software developer. I don't want to see or change how my operating system is built.”

That may be true. However, the fact that others can take free and open source software and use it as they please has driven the explosive growth of the Internet (think Google), mobile phones (think Android), special computing devices (think TiVo), and hundreds of technology companies. Free software has driven down computing costs and allowed for an explosion of innovation.

Maybe you don't want to use Linux—as Google, Facebook, and other companies have done—to build the foundation for a multi-billion-dollar company. Nonetheless, those companies and others who now rely on Linux to drive their computer infrastructures need more and more people with the skills to run those systems.

You may wonder how a computer system that is so powerful and flexible has come to be free as well. To understand how that could be, you need to see where Linux came from. Thus the next sections of this chapter describe the strange and winding path of the free software movement that led to Linux.