Olympic Softworks - GNU/Linux Advocacy in the Puget Sound
**12/18/09**
Olympic Softworks has turned off automated member sign up. I encourage anyone in the Olympia or Greater Northwest area that would like to participate or utilize this site to email me via the Contact-Us link on this page.
Olympic Softworks is a not for profit organization focusing on GNU/Linux advocacy and training.
This site is put together by a non-profit group called Olympic Softworks. Our mission statement is to make the Puget Sound area a major hub in the GNU/Linux landscape in this country. One way we help do this is by providing this site; a single dynamic portal where activists and professionals can add content and communicate with each other and the Free Software community-at-large. We focus on helping people and businesses to understand the value of Free Software generally, and specifically the operating system known as Linux(referred to on this site by it's more accurate name: GNU/Linux).
For those interested in getting involved:
If you would like to get involved in general Free Software advocacy and/or GNU/Linux advocacy, at least to some degree, then please visit; Our mission statement and advocacy page and use the Contact-Us link at the bottom of this page.
For everyone else, let's start with: What is GNU/Linux?
But what exactly does Free mean?
What if I told you about software applications, or even a complete operating system that is legal to install on as many computers as you want with no licensing or payment required? And that it is totally legitimate to make full copies of the application or operating system and give away those copies to as many people and/or businesses as you want. What if I told you the full source code was available so that if you are a programmer, or were willing to hire one, you could legitimately change the code to fit your needs exactly...that is if you didn't find an application that already did what you want among the thousands that are currently available.
The really big kind of Free.
Specifically we say that software licensed like this is called Free Software, and is "Free as in Freedom". But that also means that it is almost always totally free of charge as well...really! No strings attached. So we say it is also "Free as in free beer" as well. That's right, it doesn't cost anything to use. Ever. Regardless of how many computers you install it onto, in how many homes or businesses, how they are used, or how long you keep the software. There is not trial...the software is licensed specifically to keep it available to the largest number of people at all times.
Available at no cost.
This zero cost is a side effect of the way Free Software is developed and licensed. To help you understand it a bit more, here is a link to the Definition of Free Software from the GNU.org website. What if I told you it is totally legitimate to sell this software if you choose to...good luck selling software that people can get for no charge of course, but what if you offered service along with the software? People can get the software for free of course, but if you know the software really well(maybe you wrote it even) then you probably know better than anyone how to change it to exactly fit some businesses needs. This is one way people make money selling software that otherwise is available at no charge.
OK, how do people make money with Free Software?
There are in fact some very large companies that charge for the Free Software applications they develop, and some that charge for their version of GNU/Linux; but what they are really charging for is typically some kind of service. Like a number of months of call-in support to supplement in-house I.T. support, or a certain amount of professional customization for an enterprise application. Some companies build computers or electronics, and they use GNU/Linux as the operating system for these machines because they can tailor it to fit exactly what they want, and it costs them nothing to use it.
Some of the main reasons that very large businesses use GNU/Linux is because of it's security and stability.
You may have heard of some computer geeks talking about an operating system that doesn't crash, or that doesn't get viruses. They are talking about GNU/Linux. Not only is this operating system free to get and use, but it is exceptionally stable. Sometimes running for months or even years needing no maintenance. This is why businesses that literally cannot afford to have down time more often than not turn to GNU/Linux for the most critical parts of their computing needs.
In the old days that meant primarily servers, routers, and firewalls. Things like that. But with modern GNU/Linux, there are many companies that use GNU/Linux right on the desktop for productivity and multimedia. Want a for-instance? Ever heard of Google? One half of their employees use a version of GNU/Linux that goes by the name Ubuntu, along with Google applications. As does another small company, I.B.M., they are partnering with Ubuntu to provide a version of GNU/Linux for developing nations that runs on very low power computers. I.B.M. has also made extensive use of the Free Software office suite called OpenOffice.org, and changed it to represent their company colors and behave in ways they think are superior to the way OpenOffice.org behaves normally. They are using this robust codebase to replace their older office software suite Lotus Notes. They are calling this Lotus Notes also, but they are changing the version number to reference the new codebase.
This is called a fork, and it happens from time to time. Both versions of the office software are still Free Software, and OpenOffice is free to take from the changes that I.B.M. has made and re-use them back in OpenOffice.org of course, because all the source code for Free Software must be made available.
To be fair, there are approximately 100 or so total viruses that have been written since 1992 to infect a computer running GNU/Linux...however, because of how these viruses need to be written and delivered, and because of the layered security features enabled by default in every modern installation of GNU/Linux, these can only be deployed successfully under special conditions in a lab. Where the machine to be infected has all of it's security shut down is running in a very promiscuous mode, and the versions of software these machines are running are known to the virus writers and are known to have exploitable bugs so that the virus code can be custom tailored to infect that specific machine. Yes, it truly is that difficult to compromise a computer running GNU/Linux.
Compare this 100 or so number with several thousand new versions of viruses that are estimated by security firms that are created to infect windows computers every month, also compare the way viruses commonly infect computers running many other operating systems simply by viewing a web page, reading an email, or playing a music file, there is simply no way for a replicating virus to infect a GNU/Linux machine doing normal operations such as these.
GNU/Linux does not slow down over time.
No, the operating system doesn't run slower the more software you add to it, this is a bug of some other operating systems and there is no good reason for it. GNU/Linux is the result of uncountable hours of programing, debugging, documenting, etc, by a diverse world-wide community of developers that all work on various parts of the system. At any time of the day or night there are countless people working on adding features to applications, fixing bugs, tweaking the operating system in general for better speed, for better security, creating cool graphics for user interfaces, etc. No single company or even corporation can muster man-power equal to this world-wide cadre of developers, artists, and writers.
GNU/Linux is stable, fast, secure, and is available entirely free of charge. Both the operating system itself, and several thousand applications that have been written for it. It is used by large companies and small ones, schools, adults, kids, and the elderly. It runs big things like the Google search-engine and over 90% of the top 500 super computers on the planet, to small things like phones(heard of Android?), most feature TV's and cable set-top-boxes, most routers you buy, and lots of other things besides with more devices being thought of every week it seems.
Contact-Us: Questions and suggestions should be directed to inbox@olympicsoftworks.org
**12/18/09** Member sign up turned back off. A near complete re-write of main page.
**9/29/09** Member sign up turned back on. A re-write of our media pages, and the addition of lots of video content.
**9/21/09** Major rewrites of the front page, and the mission statement for clarity. lots of additional work is going into the back end of the movie pages and should be made live very soon.
Links area:
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