“All around the world, anonymous volunteers are fine-tuning an
operating system that may redefine computers as we know them. It’s
people power in its purest form – and it has Microsoft looking
anxiously over its shoulder.”
“One recent rainy afternoon at the home of Marcus Meissner in
Erlangen, Germany, Meissner’s computer froze. It was the sort of
routine headache that most of us who rely on the alien machines
endure on an almost daily basis.”
“But Meissner, 25, didn’t simply reboot. Although by day a
caretaker of elderly patients at a state-run nursing home, by night
he is a foot soldier in the liberation army of Linux, an
increasingly popular operating system that is available free on the
Internet. Meissner is part of a global confederation of volunteers
who are intent on ushering in a kind of parallel silicon universe
in which computers don’t crash, programmers readily share
intellectual property and, incidentally, the Microsoft Corporation
has no reason to exist, because Linux already belongs to
everyone.”
“Meissner sent out an e-mail. Moments later in Budapest, a
26-year-old called Mingo – it is the habit of the wizards who tend
to Linux to refer to one another by only their e-mail avatars –
posted a fix. Gabriel, a radio astronomer in southern Spain,
countered the next day with a different version. Then Petkan, a
system administrator at a Bulgarian newspaper, weighed in with a
new approach. The point was not simply to mend the program, but
also to find the most elegant way of doing so. Of course everyone
knew that Torvalds, the California-based spider at the centre of
this self-spinning web, would have the final say.”
This is a particularly good read, and should be easily
understood by laypeople. The story chroniclises the free software
development process in detail.