[NTLUG:Discuss] Open Source
Leroy Tennison
leroy_tennison at prodigy.net
Wed Jan 30 22:16:55 CST 2008
Steve Baker wrote:
> In the last year or so, I'm finding that the best way to introduce what
> FOSS is is to explain it by analogy with Wikipedia. People seem to
> grasp what that is much better than they grasp what Linux is. So -
> OpenSourced software is like Wikipedia for computer programmers. We can
> all come along and edit or add to this enormous body of software out on
> SourceForge (or wherever) - some of which is good and useful - some of
> which is flakey crap. As time goes on, the flakey crap mostly falls by
> the wayside and the great and good becomes such an omnipresent resource
> that we gradually start taking it for granted. Joe public can use this
> software whether they contributed to it or not - just as you can read
> Wikipedia without writing any articles yourself.
>
> Given that an encyclopedia of comparable quality to the Encyclopedia
> Britannica exists for free - online - and there's more of it and the
> quality is (mostly) every bit as good - why would you ever spend a
> fortune on a big pile of books that'll be out of date in a couple of
> years? Similarly - given that there is a complete operating system
> which is at least as good as Windows that exists for free - online - why
> would you ever buy a copy of Windows when it'll be outdated within a
> couple of years?
>
> People forget that there was a time when you couldn't answer just about
> any factual question in 10 minutes flat (Quick: When was Richard
> Stallman born? March 16th 1953! 12 seconds!)....and people forget that
> (for example) browsers are free only because Mozilla/Firefox is free -
> if not, you'd be paying Microsoft $200 for a copy of Internet Explorer,
> $400 for Internet Explorer Pro and $100 for Internet Explorer Home
> Edition. Your computer might come with a copy of Internet Explorer Lite
> - but that would probably be crippled so it wouldn't run Javascript or
> support plugins or something.
>
>
> Steve
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
To me this is a really good analogy to use, thanks for sharing it.
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