Freedom of Software
By Seth Lesondak
I strongly believe that the future of software development must lie with open source software. “Why is that?” people ask. The fact is that proprietary software is simply unable to keep up with a fast-paced technological world due to its closed and single minded approach to program development. It is also accurate to state that many people are unhappy with the direction that proprietary software is going, most obvious in people’s reactions to the release of Windows Vista by the Microsoft Corporation.
The process for open source software resembles that of writing a novel. First, a piece of software is coded in a universally standard programming language such as C++. Then, the piece of work, and the code that was used to write it, is placed on the internet. General computer users can download the software to use, and developers can download the source code for their own projects. Once a developer has the source code, they can edit it and repost it on the internet as a project of their own, and the process gets repeated, consistently improving the software to keep it ahead of the competition and up to date. With proprietary software, the whole improving process is skipped, leaving only an internally developed piece of software, which usually takes more time to develop and comes out less refined.
Some people say that they do not use open source software because it is incompatible with hardware. Actually, many hardware companies are beginning to support open source, most notably IBM, who committed $1 billion dollars to developing hardware for open source software in 2001. Also, Dell is currently creating computers for a distribution of Linux called Ubuntu. Most incompatibility issues are, in fact, caused by the people who won’t use open source because of incompatibility issues. In fact, a lot of consumers use open source without even realizing it. For instance, 65 % of all web servers are Apache, a well known commercial open source project, and 14 % are Linux, the most well know and differentiated of the open source projects.
The main proprietary software producer ever is the Microsoft Corporation, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975. Both effectively treated the open source community as a joke. “There’s free software and then there’s open source,” Gates said once, while explaining that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. “There is this thing called the GPL (GNU Public License*[i]), which we disagree with.” He reasons that the open source license makes it “so that nobody can ever improve the software.” Anybody with and understanding of open source knows that the point of open source is to improve software. It is not as if Mr. Gates has bragging rights. Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista, has been dubbed, in effect, a huge and catastrophic flop. People hate Vista because it is hard to use, slow, bloated (containing unnecessary applications that slow it down), incompatible with hardware, and requires constant updates. This alone is enough to prove that proprietary software is not superior to or more compatible than open source.
Proprietary software is failing. Every day it becomes more obvious, with the release of each new patch system patch and product. The alternative is here and I hope that people will see that it is better than Microsoft. Let us insert the patriotic idea of free speech into computer, an ever growing part of our lives.
* This is the license on which open source is based. In effect, it states that if you download source code from an open source application and then develop another application based off of that source code, you must post your source code up for download. For more information and the entire contents of GPL go to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Rebel Code by Glyn Moody © 2001, Perseus Publishing
Just Say NO to MICROSOFT by Tony Bove © 2005
The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber ©2004
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
Seth Lesondak