Open Source As a Mainstream Alternative

Why does Open Source matter? Is Open Source really free? Would proprietary software be entirely wiped out from the face of the earth in, say, fifty year's time? These are the questions that come tumbling upon the people of the IT Industry.

For me personally, Open Source has contributed a great deal to our organization's systematic approach to software usage, whether they be user-based applications or back-end server sides. I feel the organization has benefited immensely from such an undertaking. Open source software successfully delivered what it promised, from easy-to-use interfaces, to full-fledged functionality packed in those binary packages that's never before imaginable (considering it's developed by a community of enthusiasts, part-timers, and downright hobbyists).

While I'm not promoting Open Source in any way, it does speak the truth, for itself. Plain free software, most fully-functional and even comparably more useful to its payware counterparts (not to mention some perform better than their proprietary counterparts). No gimmicks, no frills, just plain good, working software. You'd never had to worry about violating copyrights, incriminating licenses, or the imposition of additional fees when using them (this being limited to usage, while some fees are imposed if you're a developer and want to sell for a profit. The licenses themself are usually under various Open Source licenses, GNU GPL (General Public License), BSD and Apache being the norm of some examples).

Open Source communities are getting larger and larger and they seem to appear by the thousands, if not tens of thousands. Creativity, innovation, and radical improvements are added to the already feature-packed softwares, benefiting millions across the globe. Patches are more frequently updated, as developers from different parts of the world, working from different time zones contributing to the software tree (as opposed to a few developers working to fix that decade-old bug)

The passion to develop helps create this phenomenon, some wanting recognition from the developer community as a whole would turn to open source as a staging monumental step to elevate status. Many such developers eventually work for well-known, high-profile dot com companies such as Google and eBay.

Software giants such as Microsoft, had begun undertakings to promote and sponsor Open Source conventions, seminars and conferences where permissible. This is a no surprise, if the world's moving in that direction, wouldn't it be also right to say you need to move in that direction too? Strangely enough, news had gone around, Microsoft asking some Linux distributions to join in a pact to co-develop a branch of Open Source operating system. While many of the Linux distributions rejected Microsoft's idea, some are still pondering if the joint-venture would be worth the effort.

While the idea has been around for decades, only in recent years does open source gain popularity as it's developer base increases exponentially. After all, would Steve Jobs be right when he said (quoting from Alan Kay) "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." ?

The propensity to say "I believe so" lingers in my mind.