Is Your OS telling you what to do? Or: Do You Get Ice Cream Headaches?
It’s the 4th Friday of the month and you know it’s time for your favorite A Gentle Introduction to Linux for Non-Geeks again! Did you go see the Simpsons Movie yet? We in Germany are lucky enough to see the film one day ahead of the official release in the US and the UK; in fact, some movie theaters were showing the dubbed version on the 25th already! Without telling you guys too much I’ll only say this: No it doesn’t suck at all, no it’s not the best episode ever, and yes I’d watch it another 50 times! Do you know that Ben & Jerry’s made an ice cream flavor called “Duff and D’oh-Nuts” specially for the movie premiere in Springfield, Vermont? It’s a combination of chocolate and cream stout with chunks of glazed chocolate donuts. According to Ben & Jerry’s it’s a “one-time and one-day-only” flavor, but who says we can’t make our own donut ice cream?
OK, we won’t actually be making the ice cream, but we can buy some chocolate ice cream and donuts to create Homer’s dream flavor. Who says you can’t add whatever ingredients you like to your ice cream? You purchased it, it’s yours. In fact, you can even invite all your friends over and have an ice cream party. Neighbors complaining about the noise? Give them some of your proud creation to appease them! See, it’s your ice cream and nobody can tell you what you can do with it.
Unfortunately things don’t work that way in the Microsoft world. Even when you spend a lot of money to buy their Windows operating system, you are still not the owner of the OS: Microsoft is. What you’ve bought is only the “permission” to use “their” software on your computer. Remember that tirade (called the EULA, or the End User License Agreement) that you saw but never bothered to read during the Windows installation? Had you clicked “no” and disagreed with the EULA, the installation would’ve also been terminated. As you clicked yes, you have agreed to Microsoft’s Terms of Use: Windows is the property of Microsoft, it’s not yours even when you’ve paid for it, so you can’t just make copies of it and give them to your friends, nor can you use it on multiple computers even when they are all yours, nor can you modify or add any ingredients in their code.
And that is the biggest difference between Windows and GNU/Linux. Linux is like your favorite ice cream, but free! Once you download it or get it from friends, you’re free to do anything with it: install it on all your computers at home or at work. Give it to all your friends and family. Nobody will ask you to sign a license agreement, and no one can tell you not to share. It’s your Computer, and you run the operating system the way you see fit. With Windows it’s the exact opposite: Windows runs and dictates your PC the way Microsoft sees fit. And boy does it make me shudder just to think how much built-ins are running secretly on Windows unbeknownst to the users to report back to Redmond how you’re using their OS to make sure you’re not acting as if the OS were yours.
Many of you savvier readers are probably using a lot of “freeware” on your PC already, which are freely available programs that you can download and use without having to pay for them. You could call Linux freeware, but Linux goes beyond so much more than that. The authors of the freeware share their creations generously, but they don’t necessarily want you to know how they created their software, which is written in program code. They don’t want you to tinker with their code. But with Linux, the program code is available for you to see, to learn, to explore, to modify, to hack. Anyone is welcome to do whatever they want with the code and share it with anyone they like. You can even sell your modified version of Linux like some of the commercial distros do. That’s why when we say Linux is free, we mean “free” as in freedom, or liberation, although most of the time it’s also gratis. More and more authors are now setting their software “free” by giving you their program code. We call it open source software. So you see, freeware doesn’t really describe what Linux is. Open source software is a much better word.
Have you ever gotten headaches from swallowing your ice cream too quickly? The unexpected cold temperature would irritate the palate, which reacts by causing the blood vessels in your head to swell up. But you know what, were Microsoft to enter the ice cream market with their Windows business model, their ice cream would just make my head pound and hurt no matter how I eat it. Try the Linux ice cream! It tastes great, you can share it with everybody, and it doesn’t tell you what to do.
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