World Changing Response 4 Pete

World Changing Response #4

Open Source pg. 127

Ah, open source. I really only have ever thought of it in as relation to software. Programs such as Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird, Audacity, Open Office, and the operating systems Linux all come to mind when thinking about free, open source software. Open source software is, at its core, free access to the source code, the base code of a program, and the freedom to do with it as you please. It was interesting to me to have this principle applied outside of the software world, cultural and intellectual ‘goods’ are increasingly easily applied to the open source world. That is, they are free or they will show you how to make it yourself. An example in the article was the open-journal movement. The profit oriented scientific journal requires high fee’s be paid by the academics who write the content. Recently, there has been a push for open, free online venues funded with small percentages of their research funds. Once this research has been published in the free online journal world, it’s free for anyone to use or read. The author excellently points out that is makes quite a bit of sense considering that most research is publicly funded in the first place.

Personally, the open source movement draws parallels to the Do It Yourself movement and websites such as Instructables.com and diynetwork.com. These sites have large catalogues of tutorials for how to make or do almost anything yourself. For instance, diynetwork.com has a large catalogue of home improvement how to and related projects and instructables.com caters to the hands-on maker. These sites, and their related movements are just physical extensions of the software open source world.