To FOSS or Not to FOSS, that is the Question

The FOSS revolution is quite a tale. The concept of cooperation between programmers from all over the world to come up with something very much productive is awe inspiring, really. One wonders, how did they pull it off?

Of course, when one thinks about it, if you’d post some code on the net and ask for suggestions in improving it, you’d get a whole lot of sorts of responses. There would be the helpful ones, the useful ones, the absurd ones and even the harmful ones. Why? That’s because there are so many people on the net nowadays that you’d have a multitude of weirdoes who’d want to put in their stuff, often malicious.

Back in the early years of the internet and when the call for help in the GNU and the Linux projects were made (okey, so the internet, or at least it’s predecessor, was in existence for quite sometime before that but it was still in it’s early years in the popular vernacular), it was still quite exclusive to those in the know. It was either your in the computing or telecommunications industry or a certified geek to get into the internet. That carries with it competence with programming and computers and, more or less, a close-knit (and often competitive) community who know each other (at least when compared to current standards of internet interaction). Such are ingredients for a more organized and efficient effort.

True, the increased popularity of the internet and computing has also increased knowledge and competence regarding it. However, such improvements are often skewed to quantity and sometimes to the detriment of quality. You have lots of young kids fresh out of computer school, bored, unemployed and hankering to make a mark. Thus you get lots of these viruses springing up all the time. What that means is that although there are a lot more potential contributors, the effort becomes more and more difficult to organize, with forks cropping up every so often.

Granted, it does not mean that the current batch of FOSS collaborations cannot be as productive, as can be seen in the Mozilla Firefox series of software. It just means that Linux is that special. With majority of the contributors being old timers, the code for Linux was made in C, which has the advantage of being near to machine language and thus more reliable than the subsequent programming languages. Ergo, Linux is as steady a program as it gets. And that distinguishes it from Microsoft Windows. The comparison becomes more skewed when you factor in the disparity in the price. That’s the appeal of Linux, ditto with other FOSS packages. Since in terms of functionality (the useful ones, at least) the gap between the “commercial” types and the FOSS ones is becoming smaller and smaller. Now that it’s clear that FOSSing has its advantages.

The only question is, to FOSS or not to FOSS?