linux

Contrary to the volunteer collective stereotype of linux, much of it now is contributed by companies and writen by people being paid to program.  In these cases, the companies have realized that it is more efficient for them to contribute to a shared resource than to try to break off and make their own thing from scratch.  The great thing about it is how it's setup legally - if one company wants to add something, everyone benefits.  Someone might claim that this isn't fair to the company adding, but they've also benefitted from the additions of everyone who came before them.

I've heard of this as a joke before (and it's no closer to reality), but interesting inteview none the less...

Good thing these children are being protected, you know what a slippery slope it can be... first they try GIMP and OpenOffice, before you know it they're installing Linux, messing around with MySQL and PHP and God-knows-what-else.

"A teacher has thrown a student into detention and threatened to call the police for using Linux in her classroom.

The teacher spotted one of her students giving a demonstration of the HeliOS distro to other students. In a somewhat over-the-top reaction, she confiscated the CDs, put the student on detention and whipped off a letter to the HeliOS Project threatening to report it to the police for distributing illegal software.

"As Jay Lyman, an analyst at The 451 Group points out, Linux is only growing stronger in supercomputing. "When considered as the primary OS or part of a mixed-OS supersystem, Linux is now present in 469 of the supercomputer sites, 93.8% of the Top500 list.

Two examples of why linux is great - how Digg and Wikipedia serve so many pages with Linux on the back-end

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21586/1141/1/0/

Highlights: 5 administrators are all it takes to administer the 400 servers that serve up wikipedia to 600+ million people per year.  Both Digg and Wikipedia now use debian-based distros - digg actually uses Debian, while Wikipedia opted for Ubuntu (after switching from Redhat not too long ago).  Also, both sites use MySQL as a backend database.