What makes Linux great?

[Jason Clinton]

Michael Surkan wrote:

> I am particularly interested in hearing from Linux users, and get their 
> input about what they feel should be the priorities. In particular, I 
> would like to better understand what it is that makes Linux and Open 
> Source solutions so useful for you.

Computing hardware and software systems are intricately complex. As 
software engineers, in the area of fault tolerance, there's only so much 
we can do to prevent our software from failing. The grand number of 
environment permutations that a user can run our software under 
_ensures_ that we haven't thought of everything: *our software is not 
guaranteed to work the way we intended it to no matter what we do.* It 
*will* break.

What Linux has going for it is not that our programmers are any smarter 
or wiser; it's that when something goes wrong -- *and it will* -- 
ordinary users AND system administrators are given the tools and 
documentation they want to solve their unique problem themselves. After 
all, only they truly understand all that is occurring in their system. 
On the other hand, I have many stories of problems that Microsoft's tech 
support and third-party vendors couldn't resolve without a 
reinstallation of Windows.

Until Microsoft finds a way to make their code, protocols and file 
formats transparent; encourage development of many small, 
freely-available tools to help administer a Windows system; and keep 
Windows profitable for Microsoft and its users, there will be no way I 
can consider a Microsoft system better than a Linux one. I don't see any 
of the above happening until Microsoft drops below the 50% threshold in 
particular market share. In the interim, Microsoft could release 
documentation, without NDA's, for everything. NTFS would be a good start.

P.S. When is IE getting PNG alpha transparency support?

P.P.S. Why has Microsoft highjacked the SVG specification, changed 10% 
of it and renamed it WVG? Don't you know that all of the vector image 
editors already export SVG?