Open Source Software
I read recently that a powerful US copyright lobby is likening OS (Open Source software) to piracy or worse. Alright, we need to put this into perspective, so you can realize just how absurd this comparison is. Piracy is when somebody’s copyrighted content, whether it is music, movies, video games, books etc. is taken and distributed. We won’t go into any big detail, you know what I am talking about.
Open source software on the other hand is where a programmer, or a team of programmers, create an application. This can be in the form of a browser, such as Firefox, an operating system, such as Linux (any flavor), or a graphics application (Gimp, Blender, MyPaint, Inkscape…) etc. and make it open to the community. Have these people stolen anything? No. Have they distributed somebody else’s content? No!
What they have done is made their intellectual property available to people like you and me. These people give many others the opportunity to do something they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. And chances are they have contributed more than you might think.
If you run a website, or even visit websites, you have come into contact with open source software in various forms. You don’t realize it, but the majority of the web is run through the open source database MySQL. Not to mention WordPress, Apache, RedHat, CentOS etc. etc. etc.
Meanwhile, it’s not uncommon for commercial applications to “borrow” code and inspiration. Even Mac OS X is based on the BSD operating system.
Off the top of my head I know of two countries that actively support open source software, one of them is Germany. The second one is Indonesia, which last year sent out a report to all their government departments encouraging them to migrate to open source.
You can read an interesting post from the Technology Blog on the Guardian.co.uk, the title of the article is: When using open source makes you an enemy of the state
Is this the end of open source software? That isn’t very likely, it will take more than one greedy corporation lobbying to outlaw what people are allowed to do with their IP.
