[QD-Filosofia] Free Software on Windows

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Alexandre

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http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/14/1838242
<http://www.newsforge.com/search.pl?topic=150>


      *Commentary: Free software on Windows
      <http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/14/1838242>*


          Saturday July 17, 2004 (12:00 PM GMT)

By: Joe Barr <mailto:joe-3zSEUl2NM/NWk0Htik3J/[email protected]>

I haven't used Windows very often in the past seven or eight years. I 
declared my independence on July 4, 1998, and I've never looked back. 
Recently I was issued a company laptop. It came with Windows XP 
preinstalled, of course, since it is an IBM ThinkPad and only Microsoft 
operating systems are available preloaded on IBM (and HP, and Dell) 
desktops and laptops destined for North American consumers. I decided 
for various reasons to make the ThinkPad a dual-boot machine. Color me 
surprised at what I've learned about the Windows platform since. Who 
knew there was so much free -- as in speech -- software available for 
Windows these days?

Sure,

there have always been "shareware" and "freeware" programs available for 
DOS and Windows. But free software as the Free Software Foundation 
defines it <http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html> is different. 
The short version is that a program is deemed free if the source code is 
available, you can modify the source code, and you can distribute the 
modified version. If all those things are true -- without restriction -- 
then it is free software.

The recent spate of critical security flaws in Windows and Internet 
Explorer, the poster-child for "designed to maximize the monopoly -- to 
hell with security" of all Microsoft's offerings, taught me that 
Mozilla, for one example, is available on the Windows XP desktop.

I needed to capture images of windows-with-a-little-generic-w from IE 
and Mozilla to show each of them handling the shell: exploit. Lo and 
behold, I discovered the GIMP runs on Windows too.

That got me thinking, and I began to wonder just how widespread the free 
software movement is on Windows. I turned to freshmeat.net 
<http://freshmeat.net> -- one of our sister-sites at OSDN -- to find 
out. freshmeat provides statistics on the projects it carries: most 
popular, most vital, and best rated, for example. I checked the top 20 
most popular projects. All of them met the definition for free software 
cited above. 15 of them were GPLed. Out of those 20 projects, an amazing 
60 percent of them ran on Windows.

I decided to check even fresher meat by looking at the 20 projects 
listed as being "on the horizon," another category of statistics kept by 
freshmeat which is defined as projects picking up steam and heading for 
the 20 most popular.

In this category -- excluding RealPlayer and Adobe Reader, which are not 
free -- the percentage is even higher. 12 out of the remaining 18 
projects run on Windows, for a healthy 66 percent. Again, I was 
surprised. I would have guessed that older, more established projects 
would be more likely to have Windows versions than new ones. But the 
stats seem to indicate this is a bubbling-up kind of phenomenon, not a 
process of aging projects reaching out for new platforms.

Here are the names of the projects I found in the two categories. From 
the most popular list are: gcc, cdrtools, MySQL, PHP, TightVNC, Apache, 
nmap, zlib, VNC, GKrellM, libjpeg, and OpenSSL. From the up-and-coming 
crowd are: NASLite, NoMachine, Clam Antivirus, Php-Multishop, Enterprise 
CRM, Paper Harbour, SQL Lite, Firefox, ACE Operator, PHP Layers Menu, Dr 
Python, and plans.

It seems to me that free software is making its way onto the desktop 
independently of Linux. There must be hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of 
free software projects sitting cheek-to-jowl with proprietary programs 
on desktops all over the globe. If this keeps up, the often voiced 
spectre of the cost of retraining users in order to migrate to Linux is 
going to be silenced by the simple fact that when Linux finally gets on 
the desktop, all its favorite apps and utilities will already be there.

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