millennium | ten

I've been introspective lately, and the topic I was thinking about today was Open Source, more specifically why I felt so attracted to it when others turn up their noses. I thought of a few reasons...

• that if you write something useful enough people are grateful to have it for free (as the distributions usually are) but also feel empowered by the freedoms associated with the license, even if they never use them, and that makes for a generally happier person (goodness knows you're already told enough in day to day life what you can't do!)
• that the source code lives on, to be used (either literally or as a reference) by other folk in other projects. Firefox is a great example of this - the reuse of a huge amount of code written for the Netscape 6/7 series browsers that was repurposed and modified to produce a great modern browser.
• that it's a way to give something back for all the benefit that I get from the internet today, the websites, the software, the infrastructure.
• that you can sometimes meet interesting people (I have!) and visited far flung places (yep!)
• that the people that you work with, no matter what their persuasion, are usually united in the care for the software in question, and that on average this results in higher quality work compared to places where people are paid to do work they don't enjoy.
• it's a great way to get feedback and testing from more people (and system configurations) than you could test yourself.

A lot of people have a negative opinion of open source for one reason or another, but I like to think that in general this is due to a bad experience that doesn't need to be the norm. I've had the ability to speak to a lot of people contributing to a variety of open source projects in the past couple of years; and in the truly healthy ones, the expected disagreements and flamefests aside, the contributors believe this is the best and most natural way to develop software.

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