Open Source Rocks

Seriously, who does not like open source other then the monopolistic fat cats that own the overbearing money squandering corperations that exist for the sole reason of making the fat cats fatter.

I have been getting further and further into the open source field and apart from the odd setback here and there am loving every moment of it. Being able to use a completely free (as in beer and freedom) operating system with similiary free programs is wonderful.

At the moment I am marveling at Ubuntu 7.04, tinkering with amarok (think Windows media player on steroids), while watching commercial TV with mythtv, talking to people on msn via pidgin, when I should be doing my assignments that I have opened in OpenOffice. I can do all this completely free of cost and if I wished to I could edit the code of these programs, edit to my liking and redistribute them to my liking as long as they remain open source.

The advantages of this are huge. It means no 1 persons or groups are tied directly to the existance of a product. Anyone can come along an go: “Hey, you could improve your product by doing this”, “I can make this part of your product better”, “There is something wrong with this part, here I fixed it”; legally and to the benifit of all. Operating systems like linux have had about 2 virii ever written for them because any hole that is found and exploited by the virus can be patched by anyone around the world at anytime. Its like having millions of volenteer coders, at your disposal.

Oh and open source is not just about the ‘geeky’ world of computers. Anything can be applied to it, think about it next time you drive your Open Source Car to the shops to buy some OpenCola.