Question

What is an ‘operating system’ and what does it do? What is meant by the term ‘open source’ or ‘copyleft’ in reference to the GPL license that is distributed with most Linux operating systems? How do the business models of Linux-based companies differ from Microsoft with regards to intellectual property and customer service. When and if a Linux-based company (e.g. RedHat, Suse, Ubuntu, or Mint… etc) charges a fee for their operating systems, and the code is designated open source, what is it that they are actually charging you for?

Answer 1

1. What is an ‘operating system’ and what does it do?

An operating system is a software that acts as the interface between the users and the hardware. It is used to perform various low-level tasks like scheduling of the processes, managing the hardware resource effectively.

Functions of Operating System:

1. Process Management
2. Memory Management
3. File Management
4. Starting the Computer (Booting)
5. Information Security
6. Loading, linking and execution
7. Provides services for application software
8. Handling Input and output
9. Controlling peripheral devices

2. What is meant by the term ‘open source’ or ‘copyleft’ in reference to the GPL license that is distributed with most Linux operating systems?

Open Source: It means that the code is freely available to the whole world and it can be modified and redistributed with proper licensing.

GPL is general public license that is widely used in the technology world. It is a copyleft license. It is generally distributed with most of the Linux OS.

Copyleft: It allows the users to freely distribute the copies of their derivative work but under the same license and original copyright conditions.

The copyright prevents the users to reproduce, modify and redistribute the copies of original work whereas copyleft allows the users to reproduce, modify and redistribute the copies but is restricted by same license agreement.

3. How do the business models of Linux-based companies differ from Microsoft with regards to intellectual property and customer service?

The intellectual property of Microsoft is proprietary whereas for linux based companies it is open source and anybody can take the code, modify and redistribute with proper licensing. Users can directly modify the code based on their choice (the way they want to customize) but for microsoft, the code is not available and hence have to satisfy themselves with whatever the company gives. Else, they can write to them for improving a particular thing which takes lot of time as it goes through a long process. The development cycle is much shorter for linux based companies. The non programmers cannot apply the customization they want and hence have to depend on windows. Customer service is very fast incase of linux based companies as the whole is looking at the code and fixing the bugs wherever they find it. But for Microsoft, the code is available to limited set of people and hence the process is slow.

4. When and if a Linux-based company (e.g. RedHat, Suse, Ubuntu, or Mint… etc) charges a fee for their operating systems, and the code is designated open source, what is it that they are actually charging you for?

The linux based companies charges for the support, maintenance and packaging. The company may pay programmers for fixing the bugs and develop features. For this reason, they may charge the money and give faster updates to the people. Generally, these companies charge money for the technical set up.