Why Linux Social contract Maintainers

Why Open Source and why Linux?

Open Source is a development model that has prove to be reliable, robust, and secure. The act of distribution of source code allows the code to be peer reviewed, which means that it has a much greater potential of asymptoting towards perfection. It is similar to publishing scientific work.

Linux is the operating system which acts as the core and allows the software to interact with the hardware. It is maintained by Linus Torvalds, but developed now by hundreds of developers, and thousands of people have added functionality and fixes in the form of patches to the main kernel.

A Linux distribution is a bundle of Open Source applications that have been built in a manner to interoperate together correctly. Each application may have many developers associated with it, and these developers are typically spread across the world. The number of people that have contributed code to a Linux distribution is in the ten thousands, and that number is constantly growing.

Developers may be financed or hobbysts, but the shear number of developers contributing code to Linux is astronomical, and can in no way compete with a closed/priority development organization. Any marketing to convince otherwise is just that…. Marketing. But so is this. Do the research yourself and gain the direct knowledge that the Open Source development model is superior in many ways.

There are many reasons to choose Open Source software mentioned above. This is just one facet of the discussion on which we will elaborate more on in a future article.

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