Imagine you go out and buy a car; you look around a bit and make a few decisions. You decide whether you’re going top of the range or affordable or second hand scrap heap. Which ever you decide, you pay your cash, you get in and drive away. When you drive out of the dealership parking lot you expect the car to go, there’s nothing else you have to add (apart from petrol maybe) to get from there to your house. Everything you need to get the professed use out of the car that you paid for is included.
BUT - when you buy a computer, you get the hardware. That’s it... and if you listen carefully you can hear a pimply faced computer salesperson snickering in the back room. You can switch it on, but all it does is sit there using up electricity and costing you money - it might look nice, but without software it’s as useful as a steering wheel without the car attached. “This was supposed to revolutionise my life?” you say to the salesperson when you return to the shop. That’s when he snickers again. “You need an operating system (OS).”
So, you open your wallet, max a few credit cards and buy an operating system - and a few minutes later you hear the Zen chimes of happiness as your OS boots into it’s default user interface mode. You take a closer look, and to your surprise, apart from Solitaire and some basic text composition, there is not a lot you can do. You traipse back to the pimply faced computer salesperson, max another credit card and buy an office suite, or a drawing package, or development tools. In a moment of horrible clarity, you realise that every bit of extra functionality that you’d like to squeeze out of your computer is tied to the software that you can install, and subsequently, how much you have to pay for it.
It is here that the ethos of the open source movement is felt.
Why should you have to pay money in order to use a computer? Computing freedom, especially in a modern age, is a right, not a privilege reserved for few that can afford it.
Computers are everywhere - in your pocket, on your wrist, plugged into you in a hospital and largely, in front of you as you slog your way through making a living. Most people go though life without knowing or caring about software.This mindset is changing though - as people of all ages worry about the virus checks, the latest version of angry birds or those pesky windows updates, we begin to realise the extent of how much we use, see and rely on software all the time.
What is open source software?
As the name suggests it’s software, the source code of which is open to the public - in other words, the code on which it is built is open to anyone to use and also to develop the software further. For instance Google used Linux when they developed Android and they didn’t have to buy the rights to use it, because it’s open source and anyone has access to it, they could use it to develop their software. There are few caveats because open source software is generally released under one or more open source license. For instance, in the case of Linux, the license was the Gnu General Public License (GPL), and the caveat attached to that license is that you can use the source code, as long as the code that YOU write is also released as open source under the GPL.
Open source is also a way of making sure that there aren’t any Gadaffi-type software dictators. If you browse around open source web sites, you will often see the term ‘Vendor Lock in’. This term refers to software vendors that sell you product A, which will only work with software from the same vendor. This guarantees that they have a steady source of income from you, and the more you invest in their products, the less likely you are to ever move to another vendor (or software product). This removes choice from the client - and essentially handcuffs you to the vendor forever. If you’ve ever tried to open a .doc file in a product that wasn’t written by Microsoft, you have experienced Vendor Lock In.
So where does this leave us? At the end of the day we need software to operate our hardware, the same way our bodies need a brain to operate it. If your brain was open source, you would want choice in what you thought and how you went about thinking it, and just as importantly, there shouldn’t be a running cost against every bright idea that flashes your mind. At the center of the Ethos is the fact that open source software is available to all.
The social spin off to this is that open source software brings about equality, parity and a sense of working together. Because the source code is freely available for anyone to use, software developers all over the world are able to dream up an idea and use open source code to develop it. Pooling ideas and sharing knowledge in a team that is essentially unlimited has led to very successful opens source projects like KDE or Gnome. Developers all over the world collaborate to revolutionise the user desktop experience every few years. On the flip side of this, closed software has to rely on the small pool of developers being paid to churn out a limited set of ideas.
This begs the question: “Why isn’t all software open source?” Clearly open source is the way of the future, if we pool all the combined ideas and brain power of anybody with a computer and a bit of programming know-how, surely that’s better than putting our computing needs into the hands of a few highly paid people at major software corporations? In terms of what’s best for the community as a whole, that’s right, but for money making corporations, that’s the worst idea in the world.
This is where the rubber hits the road - In the end it comes down to money. Big software corporations and developers can only control the flow of money if their programming is done in-house, by their programmers and all the rights and patents can be accredited to the corporation. Open source is the antithesis of this model and so is often rejected by corporates and corporations.
That being said though, open source software is bigger than you might think…
You’re probably already using it without even knowing it...
Some good examples of open source software and where they touch your life:
Android
Dave Burke, Google’s Android engineering director says “[The Android Operating System was developed so] that there would always be an open platform available for carriers, OEMs, and developers to use to make their innovative ideas a reality. We wanted to make sure that no one industry player could restrict or control the innovations of another. The solution we chose was an open and open-source platform. The openness of the Android platform has been key to driving innovation and adaption. Android is available for everyone to use and is an engine of economic opportunity for both hardware manufacturers and developers because it gives them a free platform to build on.”
Essentially that’s the heart behind all open source software, the desire to have a decentralised structure of development and organic, needs driven software development, by the people who need and use it for the benefit of everyone.
Linux
Linux was started in the early 90’s by a man name Linus Torvalds and forms the base of many embedded devices and servers. The Android operating system has Linux at it’s core, and many businesses and Internet service providers around the world use Linux because it is cheaper (sometimes free) than any other offerings on the market and offers enterprise level stability.
Unix
If you follow the history of Unix back to the 70’s where it all began, you would need a law degree, lots of coffee and several weeks. The grandchildren of the original Unix operating system can be seen today in MacOSX (the version of Unix that runs MacOSX is called Darwin), Oracle’s flagship database operating system, Solaris, and many more. Unix could almost be called the grandfather of open source, even Linux is technically a derivative of the original Unix. From an open source perspective, BSD systems (Berkely Software Distribution - so called after the labs where Unix was first developed) can be found in their open source incarnations as OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and many others. They are secure and reliable and make great options for web server hosting and other such functions.
Apache Web server
If you’ve ever surfed the web, you’ve used Apache web server. 65% of the Internet is Apache based which means two in every three times you click a link, you’re being served up a web page from the open source goodness that is Apache web server.
Continue the revolution!
Open source is at the heart of the IT world, there is a sense that there is something bigger than just making money out of software development – a sense that anything is possible if we work together. Put your voice in as a supporter.
