The Linux Blog

On August 25th, 1991, Linus Torvalds announced that he had been working on a new “hobby” to make an open source kernel already a few months in the making. He called it Linux. Since then, his “hobby” has turned into much more than just that. He spurred the open source movement. People create programs and give them away for free along with the source that they wrote. The only profits made are if you were to make a better version that costs your users or make the source very hard to find (check out transgaming.com).

As of today, portage (see Gentoo) has 101787 packages (this DOES, however, include different versions of packages if I am not mistaken). Most of the packages for Linux are open source, so there are quite a few out there. Linux is growing, things are looking up.

A very good advantage of open source is that bugs and vulnerabilities are found much faster. If millions of people have access to the source, some of them will try and modify it to fit their needs. While doing this, they may possibly discover new bugs and/or vulnerabilities. Provided, some people will exploit them, but most will report it. Some might even submit a fix for it, as to save the project maintainers some time.

This also works in the sense of adding new features, whereas someone wants a feature, they write it and submit it to the maintainers.

One disadvantage is the ability to exploit bugs. Microsoft once said, after a code leak, that it would cause many problems if people could view the source. In Microsoft’s case, the code was bug-ridden and it would be much easier to find exploits if the source was leaked. This also helped them out, as people used the exploits. When Microsoft saw a new virus appear from an undiscovered exploit, they then discovered it and fixed it. Open source helps Microsoft as well. In Linux’s case, people already found the bugs and reported them, so the overall bug count, though not usually known in full, is decreased greatly.

Another disadvantage is money. People need money to live on. If you have a job that supports you well and enjoy giving to the community, then you have no problem with doing so. If you do not have a job, you don’t really want to join up with the KDE team, as it is funded by pure donations only (and possibly commercial distributions).