With open source software (OSS) you do not need to purchase any software to have a highly reliable computer (far more reliable than a Microsoft Windows box) filled with top-shelf productivity and educational tools (and games if they interest you) that are as good as and often better than their commercial variants. And these days you do not need to be a technical expert to do it. You can buy a machine from Dell with GNU/Linux pre-installed — you pay for the hardware, not the software.
Open source software or “free” software (see below) and the people who develop it are unsung heroes of our day. Whenever you use the web you are directly benefiting from opensource software since most what drives the Internet is opensource. It is a notion that is very hard to convey to someone outside the software industry and may be a model for how the modern economy evolves: people creating things because they need them and then letting anyone else make a free copy. It doesn’t work for everything but it sure is appealing when the creations are the result of intellectual effort and can be reproduced at no cost.
Wouldn’t the world be a better place if existing knowledge and design work were free, if we were not constantly dancing around patents and copyright issues? — but that’s another post. Here I want to enumerate some of the opensource projects that I use or have been involved in to serve as reference for future essays and which may be of interest to someone new to the topic.
introduction
What is this thing that some of us call opensource, others open source, and yet others free software? I like this simple definition:
Free software is software that comes with permission for anyone to use, copy, and distribute, either verbatim or with modifications, either gratis or for a fee. In particular, this means that source code must be available. “If it’s not source, it’s not software.” — link
An excerpt from Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software by Richard Stallman of the GNU Project says a little more:
Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better” — in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution. — link
GNU/Linux
GNU/Linux operating system gave birth to the free software movement.
The GNU system is the Unix-like operating system, which is entirely free software, that we in the GNU Project have developed since 1984. — link
Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in a combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU, with Linux functioning as its kernel. — link.
One CD-ROM vendor found that in their “Linux distribution”, GNU software was the largest single contingent, around 28% of the total source code, and this included some of the essential major components without which there could be no system. Linux itself was about 3%. — link
GNU/Linux distros
“distros” are distributions of GNU/Linux made available by a variety of organizations. They are distinguished by the variety of software they contain and how they are installed and modified. All of them contain GNU and Linux software.
Debian GNU/Linux is the foundation for most other distros and designed for the operating system expert or a masochistic hobbyist. See its about page.
Ubuntu GNU/Linux This is the distro for non-techies. “Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘Humanity to others’, or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’.” Read the story.
There are literally hundreds of other distros.
GNU/Linux desktop environments
The two most popular are
KDE: which “seeks to fulfill the need for an easy to use desktop for UNIX workstations, similar to desktop environments found on Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems.”
Gnome, “an easy to understand desktop for your Linux or UNIX computer”.
applications and tools
There are tens of thousands of free tools available. This section lists some popular ones that I use which are available on any operation system (not just GNU/Linux).
every-day tools for everybody
FireFox, web browser
Thunderbird, email client
OpenOffice, office productivity tool suite: word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package, HTML editor, etc. Microsoft Office replacement that can read Microsoft files.
drawing and image editing
OpenClipArt, a collection of 7,000 open source images many of which you see on this blog. (This is the only large collection of free drawings I am aware of.) Its home is moving to the Open Source Lab.
Inkscape, “an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.” Also used to produce many of the drawings and charts on this blog.
Gimp, “is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.” PhotoShop replacement.
some others
WordPress, the software that is running this blog.
jEdit, plain text editor, written by and for programmers but has much to recommend it to anyone that needs to create and edit plain text files. A large number of plugins are available to extend its functionality.
Xilize, a jEdit plugin for creation and editing of websites and/or single HTML pages. (All the blog posts and comments I write are done with Xilize.)
BeanShell, used by jEdit and Xilize to allow technical users to customize those programs.
software development
NetBeans, an integrated development environment (IDE) for programmers. An Edit-with-jEdit plugin is one of many available to customize and extend its functionality.
Java, a programming language and set of libraries, is partly opensource and Sun has committed to taking it all the way. [update: see http://openjdk.java.net/]
gcc, just one of many GNU tools for software developers.
open standards
XML: “Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere.”
OpenDocument Format: “Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) format, an open, XML-based file format for office applications, based on OpenOffice.org XML.”
Unicode, see What is Unicode for details.
MIME, an acronym for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions defines how email is handled.
URI: “the Web makes use of a single global identification system: the URI. URIs are a cornerstone of Web architecture, providing identification that is common across the Web.” You are probably familiar with the related term URL.
PNG image format.
SVG “SVG is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML [XML10]. SVG allows for three types of graphic objects: vector graphic shapes (e.g., paths consisting of straight lines and curves), images and text.”
OGG “Ogg Vorbis is a new audio compression format. It is roughly comparable to other formats used to store and play digital music, such as MP3, VQF, AAC, and other digital audio formats. It is different from these other formats because it is completely free, open, and unpatented.” — link
organizations
FSF: “The Free Software Foundation (FSF), established in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users’ rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free software, particularly the GNU operating system, used widely in its GNU/Linux variant.”
OSI: “The OSI are the stewards of the Open Source Definition (OSD) and the community-recognized body for reviewing and approving licenses as OSD-conformant.”
Creative Commons “Share, reuse, and remix — legally. Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from All Rights Reserved to Some Rights Reserved.“
Mozilla Foundation “The mission of the Mozilla project is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet.”
standards bodies
W3C: “The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.”
IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force Working Group is “a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual.”
OASIS: “OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards.”
[...] open source software « Trinifar (tags: OSS OpenSource Software Open Free Freedom) [...]
I am wondering if Adobe CS3 and other major software actually does run on a GNU/Linux platform…does it?
It depends on what you mean by “major software.” For me, the arrival of OpenOffice a few years back meant I no longer needed Microsoft Office, the last piece of commercial software my work required — and then only because everyone else used it. OpenOffice let’s me interoperate with people using MS Office.
As I understand it, although Adobe has not supported GNU/Linux in all its products CS2 could be run on Linux. A quick web search seems to indicate that CS3 can not, at least not yet. However, I’ve never used Adobe products beyond Acrobat Reader which is Linux enabled because that serves Adobe’s need to have PDF viewed everywhere.
The sadness here is the great effort producers of commercial software go to in order to keep people locked into their products. It is effort that serves corporations not people, much like the auto and oil companies act to serve their large shareholders in the short term with no regard to the long term cost to people in general and the planet on which we live.
I hate to see effort wasted on such things when there is so much that’s more urgent and important to be done — to say nothing of the morality of serving the rich and powerful at the expense of common person. The beauty of open source and free software lies in its demonstration of what can happen when human beings act to create things only to make living a bit less arduous, without a profit motive, without regard to serving the financially powerful.
Thank You! Not ready to commit my primary PC yet, but close.
[...] incredibily well, not every open source project, but enough to make them worth examining. (See this previous post for a list of some of the top open source [...]
Strikeone, let me know if you need some pointers. If you are doing a PC from the ground up, I’d start with Ubuntu Linux, or rather it’s sister project Kubuntu since you are familiar with the Windows interface. See http://www.kubuntu.org/index.php
Trinifar,
Heh, I think I need a consult on this. We had our laptop stolen while traveling a few days ago (lesson: Don’t leave your laptop behind in a busy restaurant
). This was sort of the family computer, while I have my own that’s mostly just for me. I had decided in the last year or so that I’d move away from windows in the future. So here’s my question about Linux. It’s the basis for the Apple system isn’t it? Does that mean software made for Apple will tend to run on plain ol’ Linux as well?
See, my kids would kind of like Apple since that’s what they usually use at school. And I use some outlining software which I don’t think is available specifically for Linux, though it’s available for the Mac. Otherwise, they and I are flexible, and most of the software I use is open source stuff anyway (Open Office, Firefox…).
Wow, sorry to hear about your laptop. It is true that Apple’s OSX operating system is a variant of Unix, but it’s unlikely that programs written for the Mac would run on Linux right “out of the box.” You’d probably do best buying an iBook or whatever the cool Apple laptop is now.
See also http://www.parallels.com/
Of course all the mainstream opensource desktop software like Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. will run on Mac, Linux, and Windows.