Happy Open-Source Day!!!
So it's not really an actual holiday, and I'm pretty sure no one has coined that term, but we're gonna go with it. Tomorrow marks the commonly accepted 10-year anniversary of the open-source movement, the Free Software Summit of 1998. The Summit was organized by Netscape, who had just recently announced the opening of their source code to the public, and was designed as an event to explain how this new model could work and what it could be. I think the success of Mozilla and their Firefox browser, as well as many other open-source projects like Linux, has shown us that the Open-Source movement is strong and alive, but it's still a young medium and has a long way to go.
Ars Technica put together a really well done over-view of the open-source movement to date, and rather then trying to summarize their effort, I'll just link it for your enjoyment. If you haven't noticed before, we're all big open-source fans here at Homotron, and encourage everyone to try out some open-source software this week if you haven't before (Check out SourceForge, my personal favorite website for finding open-source software).
Also in honor of Happy Open-Source Day, we'd like to hear about your favorite open-sourced software. Shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment on this posting about your fav program and let us know what you think about it!
Jesse James
Posted to In the News, On Your Desk on 7 April 2008
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: history, Netscape, open source, sourceforge
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I really only use two open-source programs regularly: irssi and lilypond. Okay, irssi is pretty straightforward and now that the chat is full-on irc, I suppose more mandroids may use it, but lilypond is pretty technical and specific and only useful if you need to produce high-quality musical scores. Oh, and nano occasionally, mainly because I refuse to support vi or emacs.
Also, does using OSX count as open source? While Aqua may not be open source, most of the darwin core is, and although i may not use the programs directly, the software I use uses open source software.
Sadly, open-source doesn't not equal free software. An open-source application can still have a license that restricts you from doing things with it. A much better approach is that of the GNU Free Software movement to which open-source was a response by special interests.