"Two factors ensured that Linux would be used. One was the price, about a quarter of an equivalent Windows set-up," he said. "The second, the clincher, was that we could disable USB functionality on the system. This means that USB keys cannot be used. This was not possible with Windows."
The only means of conveying data from the machines is the good old floppy disk. There is no writeable storage. Floppies do not pose a problem as such disks are difficult to hide - a USB key can be hidden (and I'm not going into detail as to where an individual can hide one).
Around 600 people are at the remand centre and use the machines for their own personal amusement and also to provide information to their lawyers - documents are created using the OpenOffice.org word processor and can then be transferred to floppies and given to the lawyers.
The portability and tweakability of GNU/Linux means it can be deployed in various environments and on various platforms. Next month when the Australian Open tennis tournament is staged in Melbourne, the operating system will be behind the scenes, running on IBM servers and providing the grunt to generate the scores.
The operating system runs on any number of platforms - the x-86, the IA-64, the AMD64, the Sparc, MIPS, most Apple processors, to name a few. Geeks have tweaked it to run on the PlayStation, the Xbox and other gaming consoles. I could go on and on but suffice it to say that all this could never have happened had it been released under any licence other than the GPL. Makes one think, it does.{moscomment}
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