The Linux operating system owes most of its popularity to the fact that it is open source software and anyone can expand or edit it. But that is proving a double-edged sword for software companies who make a loss when customers switch from commercial operating systems to Linux. So these companies try and make many of their applications incompatible with Linux. After installing Linux, some users then discover that multimedia programs for playing music and movies stop working. This is caused by codecs, or rather, the lack of them.
