Introduction to Open Source (Part 1)
Introduction
In recent years, the open source movement has established a respectful position in the software industry. Many enterprises have embraced open source platform and applications and some of the software giants has adopted open source strategically: IBM, Novell, Oracle and even Google, to name a few.
What is open source in the first place? Why would anyone want to develop an open source application? How do you make a living from open source application? Is Open source good for the end user? What is making open source attractive for these corporations? Finally, is open source the future of the software industry?
These questions are what this article is all about.
When I moved to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, in 1998, I didn’t speak much Portuguese, so I took a job as an English tutor in a private language school. I used to teach mainly executives both in private corporation, as well as, in government institutions. One of my loyal students, who was known as Junior (Brazilians tend to have very long names with an average of four to five names, all in the while, they have a short nick name, e.g., Pele, Ronaldinho, Lula, and so on). Junior was a co-owner of a successful Internet design company which built web sites for government institutions, national banks, etc.
One day Junior drops a bomb – “Windows is not a good operating system”, he told me in his heavy accented English, “it is not stable”, (remember Windows 98?), “and there are better alternatives”.
I first tried to protest, but then asked him about the other alternatives other than Mac, which I was familiar with.
“Linux”, he said in one word.
That was the first time I heard about Linux.
A couple of years later I installed my first Redhat Linux system on my Dell machine, deleting in the process, by mistake, my Windows partitions, which was reinstalled later on. Since then I am working primarily on a Linux desktop, currently on Freespire 1.0, but always keeping an eye on other Linux distributions, such as, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Xandros, and Fedora core. Needless to say that my web server runs on a Redhat ES 3.0 Linux machine.
Since I have installed my first Red Hat Linux back in 2001, desktop Linux has made a significant progress and many issues I had to struggle with five years ago, now goes seamlessly. But the single most important concept, I was introduced to in the process, was open source.
Linux may be the most celebrated open source software, but perhaps not the most popular one. Other popular open source applications include, Mozilla Firefox, Limewire, OpenOffice.org, and many more.
This weblog I am publishing is made possible primarily by open source applications: It is published on a WordPress, and made available to the public thanks to Apache web server running on a Linux machine. Even the draft is written locally on an OpenOffice.org office suite running on Freespire Linux desktop.
Introduction to Open Source (Part 2)
Introduction to Open Source (Part 3)
