Chapter 9. COMPILING SOFTWARE FROM SOURCE CODE
Most nonproprietary third-party Unix software packages come as source code that the administrator can compile and install. One reason for this tradition is that Unix has so many different flavors and architectures that it would be difficult to distribute binaries for all possible platform combinations. Widespread source code distribution throughout the Unix community encouraged users to contribute bug fixes and new features to the software, and eventually this gave rise to the term "open source."
You can get everything you see on a Linux system comes as source code — this means everything from the kernel and C library to the Web browsers. This means it is possible to update and augment your entire ...
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