Free as in Freedom. The FOSS {revolution yet to come}

When the GNU project was initiated by Richard Stallman at MIT in 1983, it was seen as a few children playing with toys by the likes of Microsoft and Apple, who at that time did`nt believe in making software free of cost. Who knew that it will, some day, be seen as a threat to Windows and the iOS. The aim of GNU project was, simply put, to make  useful software free for everyone in the universe, with $0 cost. Moreover, the source code should be available free for use, you can change it and publish it as your own software, but under the same GNU General Public License, so it prevents commercial selling of such software. Commercial softwares, like Microsoft Windows, provide only the compiled code available and doing reverse engineering to get the real code is too tough. Richard Stallman and his group were seen as crazies, at that time, afterall, what was the market opportunity in selling free software? They developed many useful free softwares such as the GCC compiler, many of the commands you use on your terminal like wget, grep etc. (the list is here: http://www.gnu.org/software/ ). What they lacked was an OS kernel. The year 1991 was special not only because i was born that year, but because the first version of the Linux kernel was released by Linus Torvalds that year (official http://www.linuxfoundation.org/). The Linux kernel and the GNU free software were combined to build the complete operating system, called as the GNU/Linux, popularly known as just Linux. Add apps to the GNU/Linux, and you get a distribution (distro) like ubuntu, fedora, red-hat etc.

What is remarkable about Linux is the pace with which it is made and improved, that the source code is available, that it is developed by volunteers around the world and it is free. It provides a great learning opportunity to work with the community to improve/develop linux and various distributions.

So, what is the power of open source software today and why is it useful?

• The popular distributions such as ubuntu, fedora provide a free alternative to OS like windows and iOS. Also, it can be tailored easily for specific machines and needs.
• Android, a mobile device platform gaining mass popularity is also Linux based.
•  Facebook, twitter and many popular sites are hosted on Apache servers, use MySQL etc (all open source)
• It provides opportunity for good ideas , tools to come into spotlight. It prevents the monopoly of big players in the software industry like the ones of Microsoft.
• There is a wide support service available free, online through the community.
• The right to modify the software for your good and redistribute it.
• There is better reporting of bugs in the software. To share the source code means sharing the bogs.
• There is a possibility of forking the code.

Ubuntu (GNU/Linux OS), the most popular distro is FLOSS, the term stands for Free/Libre Open Source Software or FOSS as popularly known.

FOSS is a revolution. It is changing the software industry very fast. It is like what we were taught when young at school, to share your food with others, it is what things should be like in an ideal setting for the benefit of everybody. When you share the knowledge, it benefits you more ,than the others.