We come across various articles, blog posts and speeches in which the people supporting open source advocate about its benefits and try to attract more and more people into the brotherhood.
Being a Linux enthusiast I felt my responsibility do some thing of the same kind to spread the word a bit more.
If we think about it then the first question popping up in our fleshy brains would be what exactly is the crap called OPEN SOURCE? Many people have a misconception that all the softwares that we can download and use (legally) for free some how defines OPEN SOURCE. So lemme tell you that this is just a small aspect of the tech movement. Open source means that the source of the software is available for free and that you are allowed to modify it as per your wish or needs.
The second question would be ... Why the heck would some one make whole of his hard work available for free? How would the person or the company make profit out of it? And if there is no profit involved .. why are the people working? The answer is, its not the software but the support that is sold. Big Open Source players pay their employees with the money they get through the customer support they offer and donation they get.
So this fairly leaves the pockets of home users unaltered. The corporate people, however, have to pay for the support but this is near about to nothing when compared to the cost of lisence for using proprietary software.
For more information one can surely go and visit these pages :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
http://www.opensource.org/
http://www.gnu.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
As there are infinitely many linux distributions, a first time user is bound to get confused over choosing the BEST linux distribution for him/her self. So here is a presentation that i gave quite a few months ago as one of the OSUM sessions. :- link to google slide show
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