Is Open Source Just For Do-It-Yourselfers?
Is Open Source Just For Do-It-Yourselfers?
We blame Richard Stallman. Stallman, God bless him, is the Godfather of the Free Software movement (and by extension, the God-uncle of the Open Source movement), but he projects this image of the world's oldest hippie. Add to this that many of the original Free Software founders and contributors (as well as Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux) were in the beginning pitching in their efforts to volunteer. Add some bad press associating open source licensing and free distribution with communism (in the United States, synonymous with evil) and you have this idea that open source software is just for hobbyist geeks. In short, the DIY crowd.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Even though any hobbyist can download, modify, and redistribute Linux, it is also the key cornerstone technology in most digital deployments today. This also goes for another open source operating system which is suffused with the savor of Unix, which are the BSDs: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and all. The very act you're doing now, browsing a web page over the Internet, could not be done without open source software.
Why is this? Well, for one thing, in order for the Internet to work, it has to do one very unusual thing: it has to belong to everybody. To accomplish that, it has to be built with technology which is controlled by everyone, and hence doesn't really belong to anyone. And to do *that*, those technologies in turn have to be based on standards committed to the public good, and so on.
An early cautionary example is the GIF image format. Animated GIFs saturated the web in the early days, but soon after it was adopted everywhere it was announced that the GIF method was now patented by Unisys Incorporated, who was threatening to either start charging licensing fees or suing the entire world. Only after the original GIF patents expired (as recently as 2005) was the GIF format once again free to be used by anyone.
So, with that being said, why do businesses support and contribute to open source? Well, imagine other things undertaken for the public good. Roads, for instance. If you own a shop, you want it by the road. A row of shops, each in competition with the other for business, will still cooperate together to achieve a common goal of having roads everywhere, because without a transportation infrastructure, none of them gets any business anyway. By the same logic, Free and Open Source Software (often abbreviated FOSS) is the common utility used by everyone.
Yes, even companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple contribute to open source! In Microsoft's case, they are the sworn enemy of Linux, yet they contribute patches to the kernel because if you use both Linux and Microsoft software, they want to be sure that their product works with Linux. Apple, while preferring that everybody buys a shiny computer from them with Apple software on it, still contributes to BSD, because their own OS X operating system is in fact built on top of BSD Unix!
Going down the list, open source is used in governments (another case of cooperative public production), businesses, educational institutions, laboratories, and institutions the world over. Besides running the Internet, Linux deployments include the Loongson processor, the US National Nuclear Security Administration, French Parliament, the OLPC project, Sony's PlayStation 3, Amazon.com, Google, the New York Stock Exchange, CERN laboratories, and the United States Army.
The fact is that actually there are two Linux cultures. The home/ hobbyist tinkerers exist on one level, while government, science, and industry works on an entirely different level. Truly, the home desktop user market often appears to be unaware of both!
Filed Under: Product Reviews • The Internetz
