"Criminal Minds"?

In last night's episode an analyst was brought in to examine a computer at the FBI.

"Whoa. This system is insane. It's completely LInux-based. Open-sourced programming. You don't see this in government systems. I mean outside of, like, Switzerland."

Can anybody explain that to me?

Thanks,
D.W.

I guess the best place to start is a bit of history. For many years, the computer industry has been running on an operating system called Unix. There are several versions of Unix that go by different names, but they are mostly the same. Most commercial systems did not run on Windows or even DOS and Windows is relatively new as a server operating system. Many years ago, Linus Torvaldes started what has become various versions of Linux. Linux is a free open source operating system clone of Unix.

What open source means is that I can rebuild the entire Linux operating system from scratch using the source code. I can even make changes and effectively create a custom version of Linux for myself if I want. Much of the software that runs on Linux is also open source. So with a lot of work, I could create a "Shadow Wolf" version and put little pictures of wolves all over instead of penguins. Several people and groups have created customized version of Linux for special purposes.

Governments being somewhat conservative don't like Linux even though it is free. Linux tends to be a hacker's operating system. You have to do a lot more work to configure and maintain Linux vs Windows. Changes are sometimes very frequent and sometimes not very reliable with many people making changes or "improvements". The commercial Unix versions are updated less frequently and are possibly tested more.

As for the show comment? Hard to believe a serious analyst or forensics guy getting very excited. A majority of the forensics and penetration testing software is open source and often developed on a Linux system. In short, it looks like typical TV media hype or a writer that doesn't have a clue.

My own Linux system and other computers would probably get a more interesting response from our TV computer analyst once he remembered how to talk.

Shadow Wolf