I'm Amazed

The internet can get people to do some wonderfully unselfish things.

Most people are familiar with Windows and Mac OS. These are operating systems that let you use your computer. Inside your computer boxes, you've got this fancy hunk of metal and plastic and silicon, but there would be no way to practically use it or get it to do anything without some method of interacting with it. Windows and Mac OS are programs written to your hard drive that relay instructions between the person and the lifeless computer.

There are many other operating systems out there doing all sorts of things. UNIX is one of the oldest, but not user friendly and not owned by any one company, it's free. It's so not-user-friendly, that you'd need advanced degrees or some serious programming skills to do anything with it. There's no pictures, no point-click. Text based, and not even intuitively text-based. (MS-Dos is the text-based backbone to Windows, and was so popular and easy to use, it did really really well, hence the start of Microsoft). UNIX has stuck around because for those who can get it to work, it works very well and can do just about anything, and never crashes or messes up.

Since no one owns it, no one wants to invest tons of money to develop and advance UNIX, since they wouldn't be able to have exclusive rights to it, they'd have to share it. Thus UNIX is at the mercy of whomever wants to tinker with it. Enter: Linus Torvalds, a Finnish college student. He created a tweaked version of unix and called it Linux, and kept it free to be used under the general use agreement. Linux has become popular among programmers and computer super-users, because of it's power, stability, free use, and better usability.

A few companies developed nice "front-ends" or usable interfaces which they sold, like Red Hat Linux, or Novell's Suse Linux. As linux spread, anybody and everybody that knows what they're doing has tweaked or changed, or added something. A few graphical interfaces (point and click with pictures and images) were created (Gnome and KDE). There are more different versions and "builds" of linux than anyone knows right now. The two most active areas are very very small builds that can run decently fast from a CD or disk (without the need for a hard drive or storage) and large personal computer versions with all sorts of open-source, free software included. One of the larger versions that's gaining a lot of popularity is Ubuntu. It was started and is sponsored by a South African philanthropist aimed at having an affordable (free) operating system available to anyone. This idea is big for developing countries where money is short and computers are old or not as powerful. (There's even a big mess of tweaked versions of Ubuntu, for various situations)

The collection of software available is extensive and still growing, but since most of it is created by hobbyists, they're not perfect or complete, and any bugs or problems only get fixed as the need or interest arises. GIMP is a popular photo/image editing program that's getting to be on par with Photoshop. OpenOffice is a full office suite. We use it here at home on a Windows machine. It's only okay, but it does everything we need it to do, and its FREE.

I've used just a few different linux "distributions" (distros for short) and I enjoy using it. But my frustration is the same reason it is still held back from becoming the universal system for computers. The driver support is minimal. Drivers are computer files that give the specifics for all the little pieces of your computer to the operating system. Your CD-Drive, wireless card, mouse, keyboard, etc all have a driver built into the operating system. Each manufacturer has their own, almost every different model of equipment has it's own. And since no one is getting paid to create drivers for Linux, almost no one does. (If you're good enough to get your custom Linux machine able to print or go wireless, you're onto something most are missing)

So Linux has limped at quite a decent pace for the past several years. Not too long ago, Dell even started selling computers with Ubuntu pre-installed on them. It's an amazing thing that is has progressed so well being done mostly off of the work of hobbyists and geeks with free-time, with a good deal of help from larger companies and non-profit groups.

So here's an amazing thing: this guy Greg Kroah-Hartman, decides to extend an offer to any company to develop drivers for FREE. He's received such an overwhelming response that the project has breathed a life of its own. Countless offers from individuals and groups willing to help, and countless offers from manufacturers and companies to take him up on it. Even his employer, Novell, is encouraging he spend full-time on this. I'm sure some people have a financial interest in it, but for the most part, it's just to make things better for everyone.