Stephen Fry – “Happy birthday to GNU”

Stephen Fry explains ‘GNU/Linux’ and why he’s an adopter (you can follow him on the open source social media platform, Mastodon, too!)

Mythbusters co-creator Jamie Hyneman prefers Linux:

“Why not start with a computer loaded with basic stuff that works 100 percent of the time? Then, give us the option of adding the bells and whistles. There’s another solution available to consumers: Switch to a Linux-based OS such as Ubuntu. Since Linux OS are free, there’s no business reason to bloat up the system with feature frills.”

The Rise of Open Source Software

Companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, IBM, and even the NYSE terminal use Linux. Check out this overview by CNBC to learn some of the ways open source has been adopted by major players in technology and business.

Dreamworks, the animation studio responsible for creating classics such as Shrek, How To Train Your Dragon, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, and many other hit films has been a Linux adopter for over 20 years. More than 1,000 Linux desktops and 3,000 Linux servers power the animation studio’s tech. In 2022, the studio also announced their rendering software, MoonRay, would be released as open source software.

Android currently runs on roughly 72% of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices worldwide. Its operating system is open source, is based on Linux, and uses a Linux Kernel.

OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, uses “billions of lines of source code from publicly available sources”. The OpenAI Codex exists as a result of open source software, such as the code freely shared on platforms such as GitHub. This software is similar to GPT-3, the language model ChatGPT runs on, but with a focus on generating code.

Other artificial intelligence models are even fully open source, such as GPT-J and GPT-NeoX.

India has created its own version of Ubuntu Linux, Maya, which is replacing Windows OS on government systems in offices belonging to the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of External Affairs, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Linux is used in governments all over the world, from Turkey, to the Philippines, and even in the U.S.

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is joining global governments in the push to Upgrade to Linux!

LibreOffice is set to replace MicrosoftOffice, currently used by 30k workers within the state department – in addition to FOSS services such as Nexcloud and Thunderbird (storage and mail.) Further plans have been announced to migrate computers to Linux.