Tech it or leave it - 2
More Open Source
Derick Mathew
Little Maryanne ran across the living room shouting “Mommy, Where did I come from?”. Meanwhile a few hundred kilometers away at a college in the next city, a student tries to clear his doubt as in to how the universe came about to be, just as the a bio lecturer of the same college a professor is busy preparing the rough draft for his talk “Fish to Ape to Man : The history of man”. History always has something to tell us so we often learn to look back. The story seems to be similar for Open source which grew from the foundation set by a philosophy called “Free software”.
Richard Matthew Stallman or, as he was preferred to be addressed, “RMS” could be termed as one of the leading pioneers of Free Software. Though many events helped mold his ideology, it is believed that he truly saw the need to allow people to be given the freedom to “modify the software they use”, when he wasn’t allowed to change the source code of a Xerox laser printer to make the same printer easier to use. The waves of change that took the basis of the philosophy of Open Source to new heights are said to have been started when RMS quit MIT in January 1984 to set up the Free Source Foundation by starting the GNU project. His beliefs were simple create, learn and share. He laid the core rules, for the Free Software philosophy, which later came to be known as the four freedoms.
The freedoms were:
- Freedom to run (No, not in a marathon) and study a programs source code.
- Freedom to modify the source code.
- Freedom to make copies and distribute them to others.
- Freedom to publish, or distribute, the modified version.
These rules are commonly linked to the concept of copy-left (No, its not copyright for left-handed people). Copy-left gives every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, modify or distribute the work quite the opposite the concept of copyright.
Just as Free software gave fruit to Open source. Open source helped guide a budding philosophy which over the course of time came to be known as “Crowd-Sourcing” (Although it wasn’t the only idea that grew out of Open Source). Crowd-sourcing is a philosophy which includes armies of people from various backgrounds coming together as a community to work on a project, usually for the good of the community and not for monetary gain. An excellent example of crowd-sourcing is “Wikipedia”. Wikipedia has grown from strength to strength with its backing of over 10 million users.
For people who want to try out some cool Open Source Stuff :
Animators try out “www.pencil-animation.org/”
People who wanna build cars (What do I call you guys ????? ) Try out “www.cmmn.org”
And one o my favorite groups the music lovers do check out “www.jamendo.com”
don’t expect all your artist there, but they do have some pretty good stuff out there, if you just want to hear something new (don’t look over your shoulder looking for cyber cops, Its LEGAL to download these songs).
Till the next post then. J
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