Freedom!

Well it was around 2 years back when I tried installing a new browser on my system... Firefox. I was amused by it's looks. Since i'm inquisitive about the things i come across, the first thing i did, was checking out the preferences and, the amount to which i can harness it. Then came up all the addons, themes ... firefox users know how it's customization never ends... It was my start to open source softwares.
Time passed, i often came across the word Open Source. I never knew what it meant and it's significance, so i finally googled it and stumbled upon some of terms like Linux, apache, etc.
Then i finally came across the Richard Stallman's philosophy in GNU OS... I found it truly conceptual. In brief, it is against humanity to put proprietary licenses on software. If I buy a piece of software, most of these licenses do not allow me to share this software. So if my brother is workin on another computer, it is illegal for me to give the software to him, rather he has to buy his own copy!!! This is really sad, it brings a gap in the concept of a healthy community.
This ugly concept was used extensively by Microsoft, which eventually got itself on being one of the biggest companies of the software market. It made a lot of money with it's initial products, after which it, became the idol for software companies, and the idea of proprietary software products aggrandized. Well sadly most of the software products released use the proprietary license. These are also accompanied by using various marketing strategies, eg. a 30 day trial, with which a user may get used to the software, with him/her buyin it in the end, since he's accustomed to it's environment. The worse part about these software, is that these use a format which can be rendered by the software itself or maybe another product of the same company!
Open source provides better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-ins.
The concept of Open source believes in sharing of software, if you get the software, you CAN edit it, you CAN share it with anyone, and the best part, you CAN customize it and then share as well! :)
The only thing that open source restricts is that the modified software, must carry the same license as that of the original one. This is justified, to ensure that no proprietary software would use the code for it's own profits. There are various modifications to the original General Public License(GPL) for some of these open products, offering different ways of the liberty they come up with.
In a developing country like mine, especially in my student life, i do not find the reason of paying for software where there are free alternatives available. Also since i'm into computers it provides me much better options to make it work as per my needs, offering me a to get the software to run as per my imagination! There is like an infinite possibility of editing the code for my needs... Also if there is a product which is not compatible with my hardware, or if has bugs, i have an option of working on it myself to get rid of the problem. Also if i get stuck somewhere, whether i'm a beginner or a geek, online community is HUGE!. I can't remember a time where i wasn't helped or guided by other users in the community. There are dedicated IRC's where there are various users and developers discussing user problems, bugs, next upgrades,etc,etc
Also, the technologies are evolving at a faster rate thanks to open source softwares. A new idea can be implemented easily, since the need for writing code for the basic workings is not required, rather can be used from any of the open source libraries! Also, this brings in a much bigger competition in the software market since there evolve many products from the initial source code. The best example would be evolution of OS's from the kernel made for GNU/LINUX made by Linus Torvalds.
For those who are learning computer concepts in their curriculum, it is much smarter to use open products, since you can practically see it's implementation in the software... A great method of development of the concepts :)
One major myth among people is that open source products are free. Well this is not necessarily true. The code of the product can be got for free, not necessarily the product. Open source is free, in sense, as Free speech, but not free beer.
The concept can be understood easily with OpenCola. Anyone can BUY the drink, it has the instructions & the recipe freely available! Thus the software is free as in free speech, not free beer. You can modify and improve it as well. The only restriction is to keep the modified version under the same license as that of OpenCola. This is parallel to FOSS, that is the software being free in both price and source code.
So if Open Source is so good why the hell do people still use propeirity softwares more than open source?
Well one reason is the monopoly of Microsoft and some other companies on the market. Most of the biggies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, have all a deal with Microsoft to provide an inbuilt Windows Operating system. Since most of the softwares require a base OS to run on(application softwares), Windows has most of them provided along with the installation itself, eg Windows Media Player, IE, etc. A naive user thus gets used to these products itself, to try for the other options. Luckily these days, some of these companies are providing an option for user choice of the Operating system. So now one has the choice of choosing to shell out money on Windows, or use any free OS like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.
Another hinderence is, the misconception of open software being not upto the mark as comapred to proprietary softwares, which is absolutely a flawed concept. Well use your imagination, in a closed software product, say, there are say about 1000 people working on a project and then they deliver a product, with, say 10% of them assigned to make patches and updates of a release of a software. Whilst on an open source project, it works in an independent fashion, with people from all over the world, some contributing to the artwork, others to the code, etc. The bugs are found by the people using the softwares itself and thus the reslving of bugs are done in a faster manner.
Still not convinced? Consider the names of some of the softwares which you might be using... firefox, thunderbird, java, GIMP, azureus, VLC, mplayer, ares, pidgin, wordpress, apache, Open Office etc, etc...All of these are released under any of the open software licenses.
There are thousands of Operating Systems available ranging from personal PC's, Servers and mobiles released under the open source licenses.

And if you're still using proprietary softwares, what the hell are you still waiting for???

New Beginnings

A lot of time has passed since i updated my blog(previous one), so i thought of startin a fresh one. Well i never knew of what to write about, and the idea of randomness was not very updating... I finally stumbled upon some ideas of writing about computers and open source... :)
so anyway comments are welcome and i will keep updating my blog as and when possible...