The best things in life are free

WIRED: The trick to Linux's success is the ingenious licence under which it is distributed, writes Danny O'Brien.

THIS MORNING I woke up to a Chumby, a touchscreen alarm clock powered by an embedded version of Linux. I grabbed my pocket PDA (a Nokia N810 hand-held computer, running on Linux) and searched for the right route to the airport on Google (whose search engine uses Linux).

I'm now writing this on the flight while watching television shows presented by Virgin America's inflight entertainment system (powered by Linux) and tapping away on a terminal window on my laptop - running Ubuntu Linux.

Forget about "embedded Linux", I feel like an embedded Linux reporter: everywhere I go some angle or story about the free operating system pops up.

I'm still a Linux enthusiast - if I wasn't, this laptop would be running its default Mac OS X (it's an Apple MacBook). However as Linux becomes ubiquitous, we should spend more time marvelling about how it emerged from enthusiasts working for the public good and talking about what's good and bad about these freely developed operating systems.

I hope we've got past the point where the mere mention of Linux would throw some peculiar types into accusations that it was nothing more than "communism".

Sadly, the descendants of these slurs live on: some writers gleefully refer to Linux fans as "freetards", apparently on the assumption that they want everything for free.

Actually, Linux continues to be the operating system for people who want to contribute for free, rather than get something for naught. (If you want an operating system for free, you just do what everyone else does, and pirate Windows.)

Rather than spurning intellectual property law as free-for-all pirates, Linux supporters tend to be all too obsessed with it. The trick to much of Linux's success is the ingenious licence under which it is distributed, which requires anyone spreading Linux as a program to supply the original plans as well, and to grant a licence to anyone else to modify and redistribute both plans and software.

It's an ingenious hack of copyright law, which is mostly concerned with how to stop people modifying and reselling your precious intellectual property. Linux's licence means no one can hoard the software co-operatively produced by millions.

The result is that the Linux community, rather than being an audience of freeloaders, is actually a group concerned with stopping freeloaders - for instance, commercial companies that sell Linux solutions without making their fixes to the operating system public.

That can be a scary environment to enter as a commercial company if you don't have the right lawyers and the right attitude. Not because anything terrible is going to happen to you legally, but because you may find yourself the target of vocal protests until you do the right thing and open up some parts of your source code.

It doesn't mean, however, that you have to give up all of your special source code or commercial tricks. Google, an incredibly secretive company, isn't obliged to reveal its search engine special sauce, because it doesn't distribute the Linux kernel it uses on its machines. Even it did, it would only be the modifications that it made to the core operating system that would need to be made public.

Nokia, the maker of my pocket internet tablet, publishes almost all of its Linux changes and improvements - and with good reason. The N810 series now has an army of "freeloading" external developers working on the codebase to improve and sharpen the workings of the N810 (I can install and modify hundreds of free programs on my Nokia, one of the reasons why I prefer it to an iPhone or iPod Touch). It can still make deals with hardware manufacturers and commercial software companies to include value-added proprietary networking and geo-location software on the platform, without them being affected.

You can take or leave how much advantage you take of Linux's free nature. My Chumby is so open that you can practically create a Chumby yourself using the free blueprints the company publishes.

On the other hand, this Virgin America entertainment system in front of my airline seat is completely opaque to me: if it wasn't for the smiling penguin that briefly appears as it boots up, I'd have no idea it was running Linux at all.

So what's it like living in a Linux world, compared to the broad vistas of Microsoft and the sleek styles of Steve Jobs's Apple products? It is, I admit, a little rough around the edges and I do wonder whether it will always be that way.

My Linux laptop doesn't crash but it's not as tightly coupled to the Mac hardware as Mac OS X, which means that sometimes I have to struggle to get it to do what I want. I'm frequently dependent on the kindness of strangers as I download and experiment with code on the N810 or Chumby.

Perhaps it's true that, if it wasn't for the fact that all of us users - Virgin, Google, Nokia, Chumby and me - want to spend some part of our life tinkering with the settings to improve the experience, Linux wouldn't be as useful.

Compared to the tasty fast food of Microsoft and the expensive gourmet flavours of Apple, Linux has that chunky, good-for-you taste of the whole-food supermarket. Still, I wouldn't give it up for the world and, given the world I live in, I don't think I'd be able to. Linux really has arrived.