Open Source Software

Open Source

-        Built on the idea that even though it can be costly, difficult and time consuming it is easy to reproduce for free or very low fees or the “marginal cost of a product “

-        Allows users to read and modify the source code

-        To keep from people copying and redistributing for a fee, copyright laws had to be created (GNU Product Licence)

There are many Free Open Source software solutions, some that many of us use on a regular basis:

-        Linux Operating System

-        Firefox Web Browser

-        Thunderbird Email Client

-        Filezilla FTP Client

-        Open Office Application Suite

-        VLC Media Player

-        GIMP Image Editing

-        Audacity Audio Editing

-        Blender 3D Modeling

-        Hand Brake Media Compressor

-        7 Zip Archiving

-        WordPress Blogging

Early Stages of Open Source

-        Richard Stallman, MIT Professor started advocating free software

-        In 1983 he started the Free Software Foundation this lead to the GNU Public Licence

-        Wanted to create free software for the Unix Operating System

Linux

-        Linux is now one of the most popular Operating Systems, and has many Graphic User Interefaces (Red Hat, Ubuntu etc.)

-        Linus Torvalds is the originator of the Linux platform

-        He Created this message board post in 1991:

“I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big like gnu)… I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)” – Linus Torvalds

-        People responded to that message and started collaborating on the code through the world wide web, people from the US, Iceland, Austria, Finland and the U.K. within 24 hours

-        40% of the world’s servers run on Linux, “Here Comes Everybody” pg. 238

-        It is this networking possibility that these programmers used to connect and use their spare time to write code for something they are passionate about.

Bibliography
Clay Shirky, "Here Comes Everybody" (Penguin Books, 2008);

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2010/03/20-most-popular-open-source-software-ever-2.html