Open Source at Home
Strengths
Low cost
Open source and free software is not about cost but it needs to be said upfront - for the home user one of the most attractive things about open source software is that you can get it for almost no cost. Maybe it will be the cost of a download or a CD-ROM and a little time to install it. While the pundits sound-off about purchase price being a small part of the total cost of ownership of a business computer system, for the home user purchase price is usually the major cost of obtaining software. So open source represents a major saving, especially when you consider the cost of upgrades and new licenses.
Easy to try
GNU/Linux exists peacefully beside Windows - several versions of GNU/Linux will run completely off a CD-ROM, while others install inside the Windows file system. This makes it very easy to get a feel for what GNU/Linux has to offer.
Of course, if you really want to use an open source operating system you’ll need something more permanent, but even then you don’t have to wipe Windows. Both GNU/Linux and FreeBSD have boot managers that can “dual-boot”, starting in either Windows or the Unix-like system. Linux was designed this way from the start (so that Linus Torvalds could keep playing the DOS game “Prince of Persia” while he was working on his new operating system!).
Even if you don’t really want to move to an open source operating system, there are plenty of open source programs that work in Microsoft Windows.
User support
Home and small office users are isolated from the kinds of support that exist in larger workplaces. Even where ‘official’ user support is poor or non-existent, computer users in larger groups often learn from and support each other.
At home, we need to know that we can get help. User groups are often the most effective way for the home or small office user to find good support. There are several GNU/Linux user groups in Melbourne and the most active is Linux Users Victoria (LUV), who meet monthly and have a couple of special interest groups that meet separately. LUV holds “Installfests” where people bring along their computers and get assitance with setting up a version of GNU/Linux. Melbourne PC User Group also has the LUBe SIG, which focusses on Linux, Unix, and Be operating systems.
And don’t under value the support you can get online. In 1997 InfoWorld magazine gave their Best Technical Support Award to the Linux user community. This isn’t really surprising when you compare the sort of support you get from someone reading off a script in a call-centre with the hands-on technical know-how that comes from a community of hackers and enthusiasts.
But if you prefer commercial support, services like LinuxHelp are available and the major GNU/Linux distributors include some level of support when you buy their products. They also offer support contracts.
Standard office applications available
Let’s face it, every home computer system needs the standard business tools - a good office suite, a modern web browser, and email. There are many open source office applications and one of the best things about them is that most are available for many platforms, so the inquistive Windows user can try them out without having to install a different operating system.
Office suites
The front runner here is OpenOffice.org, which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation package. Sun Corporation opened the source of Star Office some years ago to create OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org does a great job of reading and writing Micosoft Office file formats, so interoperability is not a major problem.
Several other projects are producing mature and useful office suites, including Abiword and KOffice.
Web browsers
Netscape was the first company to open the source on a major commercial product when, in 1998, they turned their aging Netscape browser over to the hacker community in the Mozilla project. As well as being a handy browser in its own right, Mozilla is the basis for several other browser projects including Netscape’s own commercial offering and the open source Gnome Galeon browser.
Another powerful browser is Konqueror, which also doubles as a file system browser (in the same vein as the Windows Explorer). Konqueror so impressed Apple that they used its kHTML rendering engine as the basis for their new Safari browser for Macintosh OS X.
There is a bewildering array of open source email clients. KMail is an unassuming utility that just does email and does it very well. But the glamour product is Ximian Evolution, which its authors modestly describe as “a complete system for managing your communications and personal information”. As well as email it provides a calendar and contact management. Microsoft Outlook users would find the Evolution interface reasonably familiar.
There are tons of other offerings in open source email clients, so you are sure to find one that suits.
Quality and Reliability
There is a popular myth that open source software is slapped together by teenagers with low social skills working out of their bedrooms. A study by the Boston Consulting Group last year showed that many open source hackers are experienced professional programmers, often motivated to participate in open source projects to sharpen their skills. Open source is still largely the domain of the amateur, but these amateurs don’t necessarily fit the stereotypes.
Not that there is anything wrong with amateurs. In 1995 a number of standard programs and utilities on several Unix-like platforms were “fuzz” tested (the programs were fed garbage input to see if they handle it). The researchers were not overly impressed by the level of bugs generally but they did find that “the reliability of the freely-distributed GNU and Linux software was surprisingly good, and noticeably better than the commercially produced software”.
- The Boston Consulting Group/OSDN Hacker Survey
- Open source a needed outlet for programming pros
- Fuzz Testing of Application Reliability
Security
Is open-source safe?
Supporters of proprietary software argue that open source software is inherently less secure because the source code is available for crackers to examine and exploit. This is rubbish. In his paper “Security in Open versus Closed Systems”, Ross Anderson demonstrates that access to the source code helps “attackers and defenders equally”, so there is no inherent advantage to the cracker.
Bruce Schneier is a cryptography and computer security expert and author of ” Secrets and lies: Digital security in a networked world”. In the September 1999 issue of his Crypto-Gram newsletter, he said:
“[An argument] you sometimes hear is that secret cryptography is stronger because it is secret, and public algorithms are riskier because they are public. This sounds plausible, until you think about it for a minute. Public algorithms are designed to be secure even though they are public; that’s how they’re made. So there’s no risk in making them public. If an algorithm is only secure if it remains secret, then it will only be secure until someone reverse-engineers and publishes the algorithms.”
He goes on to outline the advantages of publishing security algorithms so that experts everywhere can review and test them, then concludes:
“Comparing the security of Linux with that of Microsoft Windows is not very instructive. Microsoft has done such a terrible job with security that it is not really a fair comparison. But comparing Linux with Solaris, for example, is more instructive. People are finding security problems with Linux faster and they are being fixed more quickly. The result is an operating system that, even though it has only been out a few years, is much more robust than Solaris was at the same age.”
Is closed source safe?
If the programming community can’t examine the source code, what’s to stop a software company getting up to mischief? That’s what happened in 1994 when programmers at Borland added a secret account (or “back door”) to their InterBase database product. The secret account was hard-coded into the program and it could not be deleted or changed. The back door allowed an intruder to access any part of the database, install malicious code in stored procedures, and under certain circumstances the intruder could overwrite any file on the host computer! The back door was not revealed until January 2001 - six months after InterBase was converted to open source status.
While there is no evidence that this security hole was ever exploited, the fact remains that a gaping security hole that shipped in a commercial product for six years was discovered within six months of the conversion to an open source project.
Even if proprietary software companies actively prevent their programmers doing this sort of thing, security holes are sometimes inadvertently coded into both open and closed source software. Schneier says, “The point of making [an application] open source is so that many, many people look at the code for security flaws and find them. Quickly. These then have to be fixed. … Security flaws will also be discovered in proprietary code, but at a much slower rate.”
- Security in Open versus Closed Systems [PDF]
- Bruce Shneier’s Crypto-Gram
- Interbase Server Contains Compiled-in Back Door Account
Viruses
There are fewer viruses for open source systems than for Windows. The Wild List shows hundreds of viruses active “in the wild” in June this year, of which only two effect GNU/Linux. Of course it is possible to write viruses for GNU/Linux, but for some reason there simply are not many at the moment, so it could be fair to say that the best anti-virus software for your computer could be GNU/Linux.
Interestingly, anti-virus programs do exist for GNU/Linux but they are used on servers to scan for Windows viruses to stop them propogating through networks.
No vendor lock-in
Over the years Microsoft has done a great job bringing affordable computing to countless millions across the world and it has become an incredibly successful company in the process. However they no longer even pretend to have an interest in the end-user - their recent licensing plans and support for user-hostile initiatives like digital rights management (DRM), product activation, and the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA) make this abundantly clear. Microsoft wants to know far too much about what I do with my computer. They may own the software, but it’s none of their damned business what I do with my hardware.
Microsoft has effectively established a monopoly on the desktop operating system and the office suite and, quite understandably, they want to hang onto it. So they will make it as hard as possible for users to switch to alternative platforms. The undermining of the Java programming language and recent cancellation of Internet Explorer for Macintosh suggest that Microsoft is not prepared to play in a cross-platform space, they want the whole playground.
A user of open source software does not have this concern. There is no compulsory registration or restrictive licenses. If you want to get your software from some other vendor, you just do it. In the open source world, the prizes don’t go to the company that can “trap” the most users with tricky licenses, rather it is companies that provide excellent service (such as RedHat) that come away with the gold.
It must be said that open source developers are generally opposed to proprietary vendors like Microsoft, but are not necessarily against Windows. Sourceforge, “the world’s largest Open Source software development website”, hosts over ten thousand projects for the Windows platform.