Linux
Linux is an operating system organized around a kernel
written originally in 1993 by a university student named Linus Torvalds.
I first became interested in Linux because I could use it to do lots of my CS work in
college on a cheap i386 PC instead of taking a bus across town to wait in
line for a free workstation at the computer lab.
Of course, I could have used Windows to do the same work, but, besides the fact that
the development environment in Linux (comprised mostly of Gnu tools and compilers)
is very similar to that of the SunOS Unix environment we used at Rutgers, it was
FREE. Free meaning no cost (free as in beer) and free meaning openly available
source code, which could be modified or distributed freely (free as in speech), whereas
the semi-equivalent Windows tools cost lots of money (these days many of the Gnu tools
are available for Windows at no cost). Also, Linux squeezed much more performance out
of that old PC (and continues to do so with the more powerful machines of today) than
Windows did (and does).
Today I use Linux because it's a much more network-oriented operating system, and
I find it much easier to use in my home or work environments. The user-side tools
and applications for Linux have come far since the old days and Linux is a perfectly
good OS to use for a general-purpose workstation, and a very powerful development/
server environment. More web servers run the combination of Linux/Apache
than any other OS/web server pair, including Microsoft's Windows/IIS.
Linux does pretty much everything better than Windows - even, recently, serving as a Windows
PDC or file/print server. Microsoft built up its market share when there was no
alternative, and is now trying to keep it not by innovating or pricing competitively,
but by using its share of the desktops (and, to a much lesser extent, the servers) it
has shown a pattern of making it hard for other operating systems to interact with its
own products.
Microsoft tried its 'embrace and extend' tactic on Sun Microsystem's Java. 'Embrace and extend'
involves Microsoft's supporting an open standard, then adding extras to it so that other software
written to use the same initial standard, won't work. Microsoft also used 'Embrace and Extend'
to leverage the market share of its insecure and awful web browser by creating 'extensions' to the
HTML standard that caused web pages written to take advantage of those extensions to not work
properly with any of the other browsers available. Remember that one of the most important part
of the idea of the World Wide Web was platform and client independent browsing.
Microsoft does other shitty things, like purchasing and shutting down small companies rather
than compete with their ideas, or just stealing ideas outright.
Microsoft has equated free software with communism, and has fought tooth-and-nail against releasing
the source code to its software, in part to prevent people from seeing how bad it is, and also
to keep people from seeing how they lifted code from the 'free' software they rail so hard against.