In his wildest dreams, Microsoft founder Bill Gates could not have foreseen that the greatest challenge to his software empire would come from a friendly looking penguin named Tux, the mascot for the open-source operating system Linux. Named after its originator, Linus Torvalds, Linux is the standard bearer of the open-source software movement. In brief, this means that the code for the operating system - which acts as the layer between the hardware of a computer such as a PC and the applications such as word processing - is not owned by any corporation, but rather 'belongs' to the worldwide community of developers. This provides tremendous energy and flexibility but does raise issues of support and required in-house technical skills, which have delayed a widespread adoption of Linux. Not any more - Linux is now mainstream.
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