[BALUG-Talk] Linux references in an essay

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Baptiste (o.w.i.m.ooo at gmail.com):

[Just seconding David Fetter's comments, really.]

> Parts of my essay:
> 
> << * Linux, as an operating system, provides a more customizable environment
> for knowledgeable users, by opposition to *Apple's Mac OS* and *Microsoft
> Windows*. Even though it isn't as famous, it is widely used for
> organizations that need secured and specific settings of computer
> networks.>>

A data point:  Anyone who's seen or played with a TiVo has encountered
Linux -- as TiVos run on nothing _but_ Linux.  

There are also a large number of other Linux deployments -- many of them
huge -- that merely aren't trumpeted to the skies as "This runs on
Linux".  Animation rendering farms, big compute clusters, the vast
majority of Web servers, and so on, and so on, tend to run on Linux, or
on its cousins OpenSolaris and the BSD family, which are likewise open
source.

> + can I say: Google increases its power by *opening its sources*??

Google clearly makes _use_ of open source almost exclusively, and
increases its power by doing so.

It donates back its work to the open source community in many cases
(including but very much not limited to the Summer of Code program), but
has a number of proprietary (non-open-source) codebases including many
of the ones you know best (e.g., GMail) -- which I'm very sure
nonetheless use and rest on a great deal of open source code.

> Is it right to say *opening their sources* here?*
> *
> or is it right to say :     "Open source systems"

"Opening their sources" is a term that connotes transforming a
proprietary application into open source.  That's probably not what you
meant to say.