linux::just think free
Actually, revolution started, back in 1984, with the GNU Project, a great vision of freedom in the computer science world. Linux is just a small, yet important, piece of software (a kernel) GNU was never able to complete (GNU HURD kernel is not yet ready for production environments). The writer of Linux, a finnish guy called Linus Torwalds, decided to write it and to ask everyone to contribute its development. For that purpose he choose the GNU GPL licence.
There are a lot of resources you'd love read about it. It's not just about computer, believe me. It's much more... it's a matter of freedom, of free speech and of innovation. It's a philosophy. It's a matter of monopolistic view of software productuon against a universal, cooperative and concurrent way of development.
Never do the mistake of thinking Linux and GNU as examples of communist software and Microsoft and propertary software as capitalistic and american-way software. It's just the opposite. Capitalism needs competition among player in the market, while the actual de facto software standards are based on a monopolistic situation. Software market and innovation is "stoned" by illegal commercial politics perpetrated by big companies like MS. More on it, standard definitively cannot be de facto. Somethink can be called standard just if a national, or better, international commitee approved it to be standard. There are a lot of such commitees. In Italy UNI, in Germanu DIN; for Europe we have EN and for the World there the ISO. I never heard Microsoft to be allowed to call out for standards. Still on the topic, standards MUST be OPEN to everyone. There are NO propertary standards. A good example is the PDF document format, which IS a standard and is open. You can create PDF files even without Adobe's propertary software, still doing it LEGALLY. MS Word *.doc file is a good example of NON STANDARD format. Not open to everyone, when you save a document in this format YOU LOOSE control on it, since MS owns it! Say you want to change wordprocessor, you will not be able to open your work properly, if you don't use MS patended or licensed software.
Software patents and propertary software and formats (expecially in some fields, like operating systems and system tool) blocked the evolution for years.
Now we (you!) have the possibility to change all this. It's just a matter of "thinking free".
"free as in freedom", that's what someone use to say to define the meaning of free in the expression "free software". When you get free software, it does not necessarily mean you get it for no money. It means just that with the software you got you are free to do whatever you want: copy, modify, sell, resell, rebuild, disasseble, burn it on 1000 CDs and whatever you can think about. The only one thing you can't do is to sell or pass it claiming it's your creation (no credits for the authors) or sell/pass it as NON FREE software, thus limiting the rights you took advantage from.
Hey, don't worry. It's easier than it looks like!