Sustainability

On the issue of sustainability, there are individuals who believe that open source projects cannot sustain themselves. They proclaim that the most popular and well developed open-source projects such as OpenOffice and the Mozilla Project, which includes the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird Email Client, only survive because they are funded by Sun Microsystems. These same individuals also believe that there is a misleading perception that open-source is this huge public development community. They believe that the best open-source projects are backed by large corporations (such as Sun and IBM) who have talented programmers and engineers on the payroll.  However, this is not true. I will concede that these paid developers play a huge role in the development of open source software, they are by far not the only ones working on highly successful open source projects. For example, GIMP, is a very successful open source project which is not sponsored by any large corporations. Also, GIMP is contributed to by individuals from around the world. Many individuals have written and contributed plug-ins to the project.

It is my belief that as long as individuals are running Linux as a free alternative to Windows, there will be a strong commitment to creating and maintaining open source software.

There are also individuals and companies out there that would lead you to believe that Linux servers and desktops are more difficult to install and administer. To disprove this notion I would like to share a story with you.

Three years ago I set up Red Hat Linux 8.0 on a machine in my classroom and set up the Matrix screen saver to run. I set this machine up for two reasons. One reason was to spark curiosity about Linux and the other was entertain students with the screen saver, which also sparked curiosity. My students would ask how they could get that screen saver and I would explain that it came with Linux and that they did not have it on their computers. As a result at least one student per class would ask questions about Linux. I even had a couple of students ask how they could get Linux. So I gave them a couple of distributions. These students where 6th graders at the time. This past school year, when these students were now 8th graders, I learned that two of these students were running Fedora Core Linux web servers from home! This story is a testament of how Linux is a viable alternative to Windows and is easy to install!

Now, for those of you who are familiar with Linux, but perhaps not the latest versions, I will concede that at one point Linux was hard to install and use. In the past, to install Linux, you had to know detailed information about every piece of hardware inside of your computer. Also in the past, to use Linux, certain operations had to be performed from the command line, which required that the user know Linux commands. The times have changed, though. I have recently performed several installations of both Windows XP and two different distributions of Linux. Installing Linux was no more difficult than installing Windows! As far as ease of use goes, the latest versions of Linux are also no more difficult to use than either Microsoft Windows or MacOSX! No more teacher training would be required to use Linux than was required when our district switched from MacOS9 to MacOSX and from Windows 9x & ME to Windows XP!