REthink Wine Blog

I am currently fond of two things, this cartoon, Switch to Linux, in which Steve (SuperVilian) makes the claim “I’m all about Open Source”, revealing the second object of my affection, the Open Source movement. Wikipedia defines “Open Source” as “a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. The term was initially and is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration.” What delights me is not only the thought of solo developers cranking out code in their spare time to help their team create or advance the project, but the results of these efforts.
Sourceforge provides a wealth of applications that can be freely downloaded and installed. My current favorite is Stellaruim, which renders 3D photo-realistic skies with accurate depictions of stars, constellations, planets and nebulae. It uses OpenGL which makes its available for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

It is amazing to be able to enable nebula identification and zoom in to get a close up of one of hundreds of these remote, mysterious objects.

I’ve used it to check the phase of the moon and to check what i’m seeing in the night sky.

Open Source is not limited to software without licensing fees. To quote Steve Wozniak in a recent interview with RU Serious “A lot of people think that Open Source means “free.” It was never intended to mean free and it shouldn’t mean free. People should be able to develop software and market it and have control over what they build. But when you sell a product that has a lot of software in it, being Open Source means you publish your source. And if somebody else wants to take your product and make a specialized version of it that does their few special things for their application; or does something a little different; or leaves pieces of it out; they can do that and they don’t owe you a license fee. It just means they were able to improve either your mistakes, or the things that you left out that they want.”

With thousands of projects with active contributors for both fun and profit, it’s great to see what people can accomplish when we collaborate.

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Plotts on Friday, July 6th, 2007 at 2:42 am and is filed under Site Design and Management, Resources and Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.