Read the passage and choose the option that best answer each question.

 

A ragtag group of idealistic hackers scattered round the world has created software and devised a revolutionary method for writing it that poses a direct threat to Microsoft's revenue. Their programs are already running most of the Internet. According to a survey by the British consultancy Netcraft , the Web server software Apache is used by more than half of all websites. Furthermore, software named Sendmail moves nearly every e-mail message across the Internet, while the BIND program acts as a traffic cop for most of the global network, directing messages down the right connections to their final destinations The proven robustness of these programs is worry enough for Microsoft. To make matters worse, all of them, and many others, are completely free in two senses: one does not have to pay for them, and the "source code" in which they are written is openly available. Additionally, one may modify the programs and even sell the result. The "open source" movement is Microsoft's worst nightmare: a group of programmers that it cannot out-compete because its members are not motivated by profit, and which it cannot buy because it does not exist as a formal company. In the vanguard of the open source movement is Linux, started in 1991 by a 21-year- old Finn, Linus Torvalds , who wanted to write a free alternative to Unix, a popular but costly operating system. Today Linux is used by an estimated 7 million people, and the number is growing rapidly. One of Linux's advantages is that it runs on almost any hardware, from multi-processor supercomputers down to Palm Pilots. It is compact (it can fit on a floppy), highly efficient and very fast . Torvalds did not invent the idea of software that is doubly free but he has stumbled upon and developed a crucially important Darwinian dynamic. In a commercial software company, every program is carefully planned, and writing tasks are allotted unilaterally by the project leader. Linux is different. It is designed as a series of modules, and anyone can work on any of these interlocking elements. Whether one?s work gets included in the final release depends on the consensus view of how good it is--natural selection in action. The only reward anyone, even Torvalds , gets for this work is kudos from fellow hackers. That is enough, it seems, to attract a flow of keen recruits, typically computer science students or software engineers who code Linux on the side. Such purposive anarchy is made possible by the Internet. Trial versions of programs can be downloaded, and comments sent back to the authors, wherever they are. Programs frequently evolve on a daily basis. With the help of the Internet, the Linux model exploits the ingenuity of hundreds of programmers and hundreds of thousands of testers. It is a pool of creativity that Microsoft, with its huge resources, will never be able to match.