Thursday, May 8, 2008

FOSS

FOSS is an awesome philosophy that I inherently disdain, but in this particular field, I'm down with it! Free Open-Source Software is three parts. Free is self defining and most people know what Software is too. Open-source is a little foreign to most though. Every program, every script, every operating system (including windows) has what is called in the developer world "source code." It is the basic code that the programmers write each day at their jobs as they work towards whatever it is they are developing for their company. Linux is based on this philosophy.

Now, I am a libertarian. I'm a big believer in as much limitation of government as possible, privitization of as much of society as possible, and as much individual rights and ownership as possible. This is something of an paradox for me. For the reason of furthering technology in society, I applaud and support the idea.

"But, but but..???" I hear that WAY too much. "You can't do Microsoft!" is one that I hear often as well. The truth is you can. I ask why you would want to and that seems to get people confused. At that point, I try to explain a little bit of this blog. I'm not sure why, but people are so hesitant to change that they want to blindly defend Windows. I don't mind too much if someone wants to run windows. I really don't! I went Microsoft free for a while with success. I now run one windows box simply because a couple pieces of software that I consider essential were written natively in the windows environment. The box is scaled WAY down to run a simple and secure workstation. I run about 4 programs, one of which does NOT run off of the Linux box. The network environment is mixed and runs perfectly fine. But I would encourage you to
try Ubuntu or Fedora at the very least for a month and see how you like it. It's different, yes. But there is a joke among Linux developers - "You're running into virus problems? What's a Virus?"

Here's the inspiration: http://conversasdobruno.blogs.sapo.pt/372067.html

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