If you are wondering, “Why choose LAMP?” then the answer is something you must consider for yourself. The combination has been proven on many popular websites, and the technology is free to use. These factors are why many people and businesses have chosen this combination for launching their production-based websites.

With LAMP, you have full control over your server. Most important, you have remote access, which enables you to easily administer your Linux server from anywhere in the world. Linux enables you to run the services required without running a GUI, and therefore it uses less system resources—resources that could be used to speed up the process of delivering web pages to your audience.

Why LAMP Is Free

The core of the Linux operating system (the kernel) is under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The reason Linux is licensed under the GPL is simple: you are authorized to make modifications of the software, and in turn, release your version to the public, as long as you release the source code along with it. This keeps everything under the GPL “open source” and allows other people to modify the work that you have done, and so on.

Although it is not necessary to license any open source software under GPL, the GPL does prevent the code from becoming closed to the public. Others cannot capitalize on an open source code foundation by improving upon it and then close the source, thereby making it difficult if not impossible for the open source community to develop the same functionality. This is a “remember your roots” type license and it is how great operating systems such as Linux and most of the open source software evolve. This type of peer review is the basis for what’s called the Open Source Movement.

The GPL is written and maintained by the Free Software Foundation. If you are interested in learning more about GPL, you can visit the Free Software Foundation’s website at www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
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Apache, MySQL, and PHP are some of the other free software applications we will be using throughout this book. Although they are not licensed under the GPL, each of these applications is under a similar license. This enables us to not only share in the work of countless numbers of developers across the globe but also to freely use and distribute these applications as we choose. From our basic Linux installation all the way to our mail server (the application responsible for sending and receiving our e-mail on our server), we will be using free software brought to us by those who love to do one thing: write software.

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