I bought myself my first computer for myself for my 21st birthday. That was over 30 years ago. It was immediately addictive. A lot has changed since then. The main purpose of this site is for my own reflection. Stuff either becomes of interest or, things long forgotten come into focus. This site is my place to ruminate. It is after all a vanity site.
Probably the single coolest thing ever with regard to computers anyone ever put in my hands was a stack of disks that contained a very early version of Slackware. It was an amazing day. Operating systems are the fundamental core of a modern computer system. 25 years ago computers didn’t really do much. So I studied operating systems. Slackware was one of the first distributions of an operating system usually referred to as Linux. The name isn’t really correct but, it stuck and there you have it.
Much is written on the subject of so I am just going to use broad strokes. What Linux did for me was expose me to a philosophy. It would be a tedious read to get into who said what. The central theme though was all this software should just be available. People should benefit from their work and their expertise. Code once written and paid for can simply be replicated an infinite number of times. A computer is worthless without software. If something new is needed or a better way can be contrived having to reinvent the wheel instead of building on existing code is simply counter productive.
Back in the day there were huge philosophical rifts between commercial software companies and those who held the above philosophy. Funny thing is it all started over some drivers for a HP printer. So the end result of this was the creation of the Free Software Foundation. Its major asset if you will is a group of Unix tools known as the GNU tools. GNU is a self referencing acronym for GNU is Not Unix. This collection of tools is arguably the foundation of Linux. GNU tools were released under the GPL license. GPL is another self referencing acronym with the reference to itself implied, so its the (GNU) General Public License. Its rather brilliant. The deal is, the owner maintains the copyright yet, the source code is freely distributed, anyone is free to modify it for their own personal or commercial use but, if you do use it for commercial purposes you must also release it as GPL software.
This idea was and is a game changer. Linux actually refers to the kernel of an operating system. It is a non Unix kernel that behaves in a very similar manner of Unix so much so the GNU tools were compiled for it. Now would be a good time to mention just how ubiquitous GNU tools are. At the time the Linux kernel was released into the wild most if not all versions of commercial Unix contained the GNU tools and were in widespread use. The GNU tools are pretty much a comprehensive set of tools that make well, uhm with addition of a kernel the operating system. So now the world has free unix free of restriction. Different groups and individuals started to come up with combinations of software, the GNU tools, and the Linux kernel these were called Distributions. Slackware was one of these early distributions.
So why does this crap matter. Read on and I’ll get into it briefly. This is published on a web server right? I can even tell you what kind of web server. It is an Apache web server. What most people call the internet is really just the World Wide Web. I say just, because a HTTP server or web sever is just a subset of what the internet consists of. I do go back before the days of the web and just leave it at that. One of the first common packages to be included with early distributions was the open source Apache web server. Today more than 50% of all web servers in the world are Apache server and most likely running on a Linux box. So there you go. All this E-commerce this and Social media that, its running on free software. The web as it is today simply would not exist without GNU, The FSF, Linux, and Apache. All boring operating system mumbo jumbo. So I relate heavily to all the giants who have made my life interesting just by humbly following along with their brilliance the best I can.
So my philosophy is to use as much open source GPL software as possible. It keeps costs down, the money spent goes to those producing “software as a service”. I do use and own a great deal of commercial software as well. I resent the attitude of those who provide it and pay them their money begrudgingly. Fortunately the list of must have commercial software is getting shorter. Who knows maybe the day will come when I am no longer dependent on it and can make a living or run a business without it. Its possible to do a great deal without commercial software and my network at work as you may have guessed by now runs GPL’d open source Linux and BSD. I couldn’t have built it otherwise, we couldn’t afford it.