Myths about Open Source

Agent 001

I recently met an old school friend over a cup of coffee and we spoke about life, movies and music. Then the topic moved on to technology, the best graphic card and I suggested what motherboard he should buy. Giving such advice just never gets me tired. Anyway, the conversation moved to open source and how he really didn’t get the concept of it and he was just against it. This friend of mine was a loyal one operating-system man and didn’t want to move away from his comfort zone. He also had a few doubts about open source in general – but these were just myths and random rumours heard from others that I’m sure many people have come across. So I decided to go through them and be a myth buster of sorts. Maybe he won’t use open source, but at least he won’t be against it, is what I thought.

It’s not that I don’t use open source, I do use many free programs, so you could say I’m not against it.

Ah, that’s where you are mistaken. You see, everything free is not open source and everything open source is not necessarily free. An open source project is first started off with an idea from somebody. Of course nobody will just jump on the bandwagon immediately, as first that person will have to create the application or operating system he is making. From then on, an announcement can be made where in people will form a community around that project and help develop it. There is a licence called the GPL (GNU General Public Licence) under which there is something known as copyleft, which lets the creator have rights over the software, but at the same time it can be used, modified and distributed freely.

So where does money come into play?

Open source has licences that can be beneficial to the creators. Some companies have dual licences, which allows them to charge for their product or services. So their trademark is in place and they can sell their product. If there are individuals who are doing the same for their distributions or software, then it is basically the cost of the media that you will be paying for. (Eg. CDs, DVDs, etc.)

Sounds fair, but what about support for all this? I’ve heard so many complaints from friends that they keep getting stuck while using Linux either at work or at home. Not everybody went to engineering college and studied programming, you know.