Section 2.5. Software Distribution

2.5. Software Distribution

While free software developers know how to code, what about getting the code in front of the user? In the early days of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the answer was to send out tapes and disks to users who wanted the tools, for a reasonable fee. Now that so many people have connections to the Internet, boxed software is beginning to show its age, but software producers are really just now learning from open source how to distribute software in this way.

2.5.1. Dependencies

When you compile a piece of software, you sometimes end up relying on libraries that you must call from your program to do some task. If you try to run the program without the expected complement of libraries, it cannot run or it may run poorly. Open source developers have created some very smart packaging and installation systems and filesystem methods that can make this a more tractable problem. Once they created these packaging systems and combined them with the Internet, they got online updating. The irony is that, in a lot of ways, Linux and Unix were schooled in this by Windows. A common complaint regarding Linux when comparing it to Windows and OS X is that software can be very difficult to install. One could argue that Windows isn't all that easy to install either, but since Windows is preinstalled on most computers, this is an argument that often falls on deaf ears.

I don't think Linux developers have learned to do installation well yet. There are some standouts, but for the most part, installation ease is still a work in progress. One thing free and proprietary share is the appreciation for and development of online updating systems. This is something Linux distributions get very right. In short, once Linux is installed on your machine, it can be very easy to keep it up to date.

2.5.2. Online Updating/Installation

Online updating is a terrific way of getting software onto your machines. More importantly, it is a terrific way to maintain a secure system over time. Since Linux distributions don't have to worry about software license ownership, it is very easy for the software to determine whether to download a patch or fix, and thus many Linux distributions have systems to facilitate this. Proprietary software development houses such as Microsoft are still trying to figure this out. It is a hard problem when you mix it with licensing concerns. Additionally, when it's done wrong, you can literally crash thousands, or in the case of Microsoft and Apple, millions of machines, so it is really critical to do well. That the Debian and Fedora Core Linux distributions do this at all is quite a feat.

Want a sticky issue? Do you trust your software vendor to allow it to automatically update your software? For some, this question is heard in these ways:

• Do you trust Microsoft to update your operating system?

• Do you trust a bunch of bearded Unix programmers to update your system?

How you react to these questions has a lot to do with the realities of how difficult the problem is, how successful previous auto-updates have been in the past, and how trusting you arewhich brings up the subject of the next section.