A world without Linux

Let’s play a game: imagine a world with no open source software. Imagine Steve Ballmer invented a time machine, went back to 1953 and prevented the birth of Richard Stallman, the father of the Free Software Foundation. Overnight, everything open source vanishes from the face of the planet – but what changes?

Of course, GNU/Linux disappears. Something like 75% of the world’s web servers grind to a halt or have to switch to Windows. You can kiss goodbye to every Android phone and tablet too. You’re OK as you’re an Apple owner? Nope, the Darwin kernel is based in part on the open source BSD kernel, while Safari uses the open source WebKit, to take just two examples of the open source elements that power both its mobile iOS and desktop OS X operating systems.

We’d be left in a world of Windows, but without iOS and Android to compete against, Microsoft would have been happy to continue flogging us all its Windows Mobile OS and Windows XP on the desktop. And with so many web technologies based on open source and open platforms, the internet as we know it would cease to exist: we’ve already kissed goodbye to Safari, but bang goes Chrome, Firefox, WordPress, Docker, OpenStack and OpenSSL – the list goes on and on.

This was just a silly academic exercise, but the point is to show how widely open source is used. It increases choice: Android can be adopted and adapted by any company. It speeds adoption of technologies: source code has to be made publicly available, so everyone can use it and contribute to it. It reduces costs: there’s no need to develop technologies from scratch or buy them in at great cost, and tried and tested code can be reused. It fuels standards: Docker is a cloud phenomena that even Microsoft has to embrace.

So as you read this issue, taking in open source media centres, streaming standards, open server systems, Minecraft alternatives, filesystems, drawing packages, OpenLDAP, alternative kernels, programming and so much more, just thank Stallman* open source exists at all.