Unit 3: Free software conquers the world (without anyone noticing)

It is everywhere

There is a delicious irony in the history of free software: it won the battle without most people noticing. While the general public went on associating "free software" with "something free of charge and probably worse", free software quietly became the foundation on which practically the entire digital world runs.

Let us look at the numbers.

Web servers. Every time you open a web page, the odds are that the page is being served to you by free software. Apache, launched in 1995, was for years the most widely used web server in the world. Nginx, launched in 2004, challenged it for the throne. Between them, together with other open source servers, they serve the vast majority of the internet. 96.3% of the world's most important servers run Linux. Not 50%. Not 70%. Ninety-six per cent.

Databases. The world's data is stored mostly in free databases. MySQL, created in 1995, was acquired by Oracle, which prompted the community to create a fork called MariaDB to guarantee its continuity as free software. PostgreSQL, the database that Odoo uses and that you are going to get to know in this course, is considered the most advanced open source relational database in the world. They compete head to head with proprietary products that cost tens of thousands of euros in licences.

Your mobile phone. Every time you unlock your Android phone, you are using Linux. Android, the most widespread mobile operating system on the planet with more than 3 billion active devices, is built on the Linux kernel. The most widely used operating system in the history of humanity is free software.

Your browser. Chromium, the open source project that serves as the basis for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave and Opera, is free software. Firefox, developed by the Mozilla foundation, is too. Practically all modern browsers are built on open source code.

Your everyday life. VLC, the video player that opens any format without complaint, is free software. LibreOffice, the alternative to Microsoft Office, is free software. WordPress, which powers more than 40% of the world's websites, is free software. 7-Zip, GIMP, Blender, Audacity... the list is endless.

The giants have feet of free software

But where the dominance of free software becomes truly astonishing is in the back rooms of the big technology companies, the very companies the public associates with proprietary software.

Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud computing provider in the world, runs on Linux. Google runs Linux on its millions of servers. Netflix streams its films and series using FreeBSD, another free operating system. Tesla runs Linux on the onboard computers of its cars. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp run on Linux infrastructure. Microsoft, the company that for years called free software "a cancer", is today one of the largest contributors to open source projects in the world, and its own Azure cloud runs more Linux machines than Windows.

Modern cloud infrastructure -Kubernetes for orchestrating containers, Docker for packaging applications, Terraform for managing infrastructure, Ansible for automating configurations- is practically all free software. There is no proprietary alternative that competes at its level.

The uncomfortable truth for proprietary software

Free software is not "the cheap alternative". It is not "what you use when you cannot afford the good stuff". It is, quite simply, the industry standard. What is exceptional, what is unusual in the world of professional software today, is proprietary software. The most valuable companies on the planet build their services on free software not out of idealism, but because it is objectively better: more secure (because thousands of eyes review the code), more reliable (because thousands of organisations depend on it and contribute to improving it), and more flexible (because you can adapt it to your needs without depending on a supplier).

This is the reality we should keep in mind when, in the next unit, we talk about ERP. Because if free software is the standard in servers, in databases, in mobile phones, in browsers and in cloud infrastructure, why would it not also be the standard for managing your company?