User:ScotXW/Advantages and benefits of free and open-source software

Software, i.e. application software as well as a kernel or device drivers, developed and distributed under some free software or open-source software license, holds some advantages.

After the shocking discovery, that some end-users don't care whether their equipment is Linux-driven, even though we all know, that Linux is free and open-source software. To avoid such Idiocracy-style Brawndo advertisement, let's look at real advantages and benefits...:

General
Advantages and benefits of User:ScotXW/Free and open-source software/free and open-source software:

Free and open-source software can
 * be adapted to the underlying hardware solution
 * be customized to meet job specification as exactly as possible
 * be security audited
 * by the user, being an individual, a company or a public institution, or by some contractor(s) without the slightest vendor lock-in
 * usually there is an abundance of more or less experienced contractors available to accomplish the tasks above and also the system administration, maintenance and technical support
 * the profile of the potential contractor starts at some student (or pupil), a freelancer, some Small and medium enterprises to huge corporations
 * stability and security issues can be addressed and resolved in a direct manner by the user or all users using a community approach
 * higher motivation to exchange testing results and user experiences between adopters directly or openly, especially if they are not competitors
 * higher motivation to contribute back to the software by bug-reports, since there is no external profiteer, that could charge for the improvements and bug-fixes, because the code is simply available
 * at will cooperation based on mutuality and reciprocity
 * there is no contractual dependency on the vendor whatsoever; (please note that a lack of resources to work with the source code is not solvable by any license)
 * very often free and open-source software if also free of cost, leaving maximum financial leverage to be put into the tailoring of the entire hard- and software solution (which can be outsourced to external contractors)
 * very ubiquitous free and open-source software, depending on the adoption rate and the time scale, has been extensively security audited and tested on many hardware solutions and in various application scenarios; e.g. the Linux kernel is ubiquitously in use on servers, routers and mobile devices all over the world, hence field-tested and case-hardened for the exposure in the Internet.
 * software is an immaterial good ; when such a good is distributed under a free and open-source license, its monetary and non-monetary value to its users and to the economy they are part of can multiply heavily

Benefits that are not immediate and compulsive features of free and open-source software, but are present in it or promoted by it and absent in many, most or all available proprietary software solutions comprise
 * the low rate or complete absence of malware
 * the respect of the user's privacy
 * and the adherence of the proprietor's or proprietress' full control over his or her own hardware

Free and open-source software in its initial state be hard to cumbersome, i.e. comprise of a set of patches to some existent code, which has to be downloaded in a certain version, patched and then compiled. But it can also be a ready to use Linux distribution, with a software repository that comprises 37,000 software packages compiled for different instruction sets, that can be very conveniently installed and maintained by employing the package management system, making it very simple to install and set-up some operating system for the desktop computer or a LAMP stack or LYME stack one some server.

The LAMP stack may be one of the reasons for the very high Linux adoption rate among web servers. nginx, another web server written in C is next in line.

GPL, a copyleft license, and the competitive advantage

 * moved to Mainlining your device driver in Linux kernel

GPLv2 versus GPLv3 (GPPL)
GPL version 3 should exist, but Linux Torvalds said, it should be named GPPL instead of GPLv3. His arguments are well though through. Search the web, not the Wikipedia.

Marketing blunders by Richard Stallman and "his" FSF

 * the word "free" in all its annotations: freedom, free-of-cost, more free (BSD- and MIT-licensed), less free (GPL-licensed), etc.
 * concentrating too much on ethics instead of the market and paying your rent or paying for your healthcare
 * Linux vs. GNU/Linux: IMO
 * IF calling Linux kernel-based operating systems "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" means paying credit to the FSF's GNU, THEN that would be adequate and fine and fair.
 * IF calling Linux kernel-based operating systems "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" means putting up with all the marketing blunders and with what comes out of Richard Stallman's mouth, THEN that would be a blunder.
 * There is the Linux Foundation: Linux kernel, netfilter, nftables, util-linux, ethtool, iproute2, KVM & Xen, etc.
 * There is GNU: e.g. GNU C Library, GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Debugger, GNU Core Utilities, even GNOME is part of the "GNU orbit", etc.
 * There is everything else FOSS that runs on top of Linux kernel/glibc: e.g. X Window System, Wayland, Qt, KDE, open-source video games; uClibc, BusyBox (both GPL, both share code with their GNU conterparts!), LLVM/Clang, etc.
 * There is Proprietary freeware for Linux: AMD Catalyst, Nvidia GameWorks, Valve Steam, etc.
 * There is Proprietary commercia software for Linux: Autodesk Maya, Siemens NX, etc.

Oh, and then there is Google with their Linux kernel + binder, ashmem, pmem, etc/libbionic, introducing some incompatibilities with glibc/uClibc-based software. The Wikipedia sadly does not point out the extents of these incompatibilities, but at least there is an article for libhybris, which was written to deal with these incompatibilities.

Und, natürlich, then there is the whole POSIX/UNIX®/Unix-like confusion. Some brain-dead people™ are working on this very hardly.

I have tried to deal with the X11-myths, see e.g. Direct Rendering Infrastructure or my contributions to the Wayland-article, and also with the (POSIX/UNIX®/Unix-like)-confusion, partly in my user-space, because ...