Full-Power Software Bundled For Free

Linux distributions include huge amounts of open-source software for almost any purpose you could want. The world's most popular webserver, Apache, is included in all major distributions. Compilers and interpreters for just about every computer language ever invented come free with most distributions. FTP servers, IRC hosts, job schedulers, terminal emulators, web browsers, spreadsheets, database servers, file and print servers, professional typesetting, and much, much, much more are included at no additional cost. And all of these have no license fees, limitations on the number of users, expiration dates, and more.

The practical upshot of this is that Linux installations almost always have a substantially lower cost than a comparable commercial installation such as Solaris or Windows. Microsoft's Visual Studio 6.0 (including Visual Basic 6.0, Visual C++ 6.0, Visual InterDev 6.0, Visual J++ 6.0, and Visual FoxPro 6.0) costs $995.00. Under Linux, you get GCC and G++ (C and C++ compilers), BASIC, Java, and database development software, and a literally dozens of other languages, all bundled with the operating system for as little as $1.99, or free if you want to download them.

Add in the cost of Windows NT Workstation or Server ($276 to $4700), Office 97 ($549.65), and so on, and you have spent thousands of dollars, and you'll probably need a recent Pentium-II machine with 512MB of RAM to run it all. Or, you can use a midrange Pentium and get it all free with Linux.