THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ENGLISH WORD -- TODAY

LINUX (lae-noks, lee-nooks, lye-noks, lye-nooks), in whatever way you pronounced it, is the most beautiful word in the English language in use today, or of any other tongue that may have adapted it in their vocabulary. It is beyond ethnic, religious and ideological doctrines and borders. It is convergence in itself, fusing differences in patent, licensing and cost. For Linux is synonymous with freedom and liberation. Freedom of use. Freedom of making Linux work for you. Freedom of cost.

Freedom also from the bondage that Microsoft is exerting upon ordinary users. Linux is that sword that shall set us free against that kind of oppression on the desktop front. A double-edged sword at that.

Tech guys associated with using Microsoft Windows for years and who shuddered at the thought of working in a Windows-less environment just laughed at us people who wanted to use open source operating systems like Linux reasoning that Windows is a much better OS platform, technically and user-friendly wise. Yes, that could be true two or three years ago, but, not anymore.

Linux has evolved into so many different distros and in different versions in such a pace that one version is obsolete by a half year's time with another newer version released. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) environment with which Windows has dominated for years and which it had relied upon as benchmark for market dominance has been shrinking as newer Linux versions began to behave Windows-like but, unmistakably, retaining that effervescent Linux signature – the all pervading FREEDOM. Which is what Linux is all about.

When you talk about Linux, you will also talk about security. How secure is Linux from malicious software, from internet worms and from virus? To tell you the truth, no software is invulnerable to these kind of threats but the chances of it infiltrating on a desktop running on a Linux OS platform is lesser than what is one having a Windows would have experienced. It's almost nil. That's how hard it is for malware writers to crack open Linux codes than for them to crack one with Windows.

But, for sure, there will come a time when they find cracking Windows open a boring and witless preoccupation and turn their enthusiasm and creative damage at Linux instead. By that time, newer and better Linux versions would have been miles away from their harm as it is evolving and developing at warp-speed beyond that of any proprietary software company's idea and capability.

In all my 40 years or something living as a resident of Cebu City, a metropolis in southern Philippines; I have never found, except one, of a semi-permanent and conspicuous advertisement billboard wherein Linux is offered as one of a computer-related business' services. Though I find many such advertisements in newspapers, magazines and websites; but never in such a prominent place and on a real and analog structure.

What amused me though is that Linux is placed prominently above that of Windows and it is not alphabetically arranged either. And to think that Cebu is a market dominated 99.8% by Microsoft where they poured out millions of pesos here just for advertisements and perks on all PC and software distributors and stores just to keep their iron grip here. But not all.

The billboard is found on Governor Cuenco Avenue (the old Banilad Road) corner Paradise Village Road in Barangay Kasambagan. The owners, perhaps, have foreseen the prominence with which Linux would affect the desktop world and the Internet in the near future and have, in the process, preconditioned the arrival of Linux in this part of the world by putting up this sign. Or perhaps, they are just unaware of things to come and, by chance, some typo error have robbed the other of that order of importance. Whichever that may be.

We do like to own personal desktops with something like Windows or a Mac OS X running in it, don't we? But, it does take a small fortune to invest in having one. I, myself, could not afford it. So are my workmates and my neighbors. I have solved that predicament by switching my use to that of Ubuntu Linux and I am quite comfortable with it. Or let's just say, that I was quite desperate then. Or delirious. Whatever it is or was, Ubuntu OS rocks so well with my tune!

I need not have to elaborate. It is for you to find out. Though we are a third world country, it doesn't mean that we don't deserve something good and, at the same time, free like Linux, do we? Do you? Linux is open source technology's gift to mankind. And don't they say that “all good things in life are those that are given free”?

Document done in OpenOffice 2.1 Writer, Trebuchet MS font, size 12.