"There's no such thing as free software."

[elfs]

Ken Starks of HeliOS, a small Linux advocacy group, recently ran into a headache when he encountered a teacher name Karen who was so angry about him giving Linux distro disks to kids at her middle school,

I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.

She's right, in one sense-- every minute spent developing open source software is a minute the developer "spent" without making a profit (well, okay, to a first approximation). Karen's confusion is tragic-- if you follow the link, you'll find that she believes that Microsoft's operating system is what kids will have to deal with in the real world, that Linux is little more than a "carnival show," and the Linux community does real harm to children by making them think that some things really are free.

Okay, so Karen is wrong, but I think most of the open source community doesn't understand why she's wrong, or what to say in response.

An operating system is not a commodity. Commodity: 'anything for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.' Wheat is wheat. Iron is iron. But Windows is not Ubuntu; they have qualitative differences between them.

But what is not qualitatively different is the underlying knowledge that the Microsoft Corporation and the Linux Community have in common. That is commodity knowledge. There are no real secrets to how to make an operating system, and anyone with enough time and energy can make one.

The same is true of a house or a car: building one of those is commodity knowledge. There's no secret there. The difference between a house and an operating system is that the source code of an operating system is exceptionally easy to copy, whereas the materials for a house are not. Software, therefore, has a ratchet: every time an improvement is added, it persists and is distributed in all future versions.

I think, if we're going to win this battle, we have to make these two points:

1. The Linux Operating System is built atop commodity knowledge everyone has access to, and
2. The Linux Operating System improves because every person who has the itch, "I wish that worked better for me" and scratches that itch makes it work better for everyone.

To succeed, we have to convince people of one salient detail: Operating systems are not mysterious. The knowledge on how to build one is available in every Barnes & Noble on the planet. Linux is just one operating system, but it's size and popularity naturally attract talented people to it, and it continues to improve because people want their computers to work for them, efficiently, fast, and error-free. The accessibility of source code gives people from one project the hope of learning from the lessons of other projects.

When you contract to build a house, you would hire a company with a good reputation. In that sense, we should always ask: does Microsoft have a good reputation? Or is it just the biggest game in town?