What I Like About FLOSS

The greatest things about FLOSS is freedom. It is freedom to do what is right. It is freedom to share and share alike. It is not that it is free, but that we are free from it. If you use Windows, especially, you are bound up by the EULA that they enforce upon you. You are not free to use Windows, because it has rights over you. With FLOSS, however, your only responsibility is to maintain the freedom that it gives you. You are not required to do anything specific. You cannot take it and present it as something you have created, but just about anything else you want to do is cool. You can use it for work, unlike the more reasonably priced version of MS Office. You can take it and sell it if you want, because you are free to do that. Of course, in practical terms, the only way to do that is if you make some improvement or modification in such a way that it isn't a direct change which needs to be returned to the community who developed it. You are free to study it and learn how it works, so that you can create things that are better.

The curious thing is that in many cases it is better software as well. The complaints that people tend to have about FLOSS are rarely about it working properly. The software, in most cases, does what it is meant to do, and does it well and properly. I will discuss the problems people have with it in another post, as I wish to focus here on the good it has. And the good is how stable and effective it usually is.

The last thing I wish to bring up here is the community. Community is a concept that has been adopted, admittedly by proprietary software. That is what makes a forum work. Forums are dependent on community. However, it isn't so real a community as it is in FLOSS. There are problems in many of the communities, but they are still more good than anything else. They are what gives life to the software and the projects. Once there is a community, the project is likely to succeed, because there is a community to support it and maintain it. It no longer rests in the hands of one, but of many with their own reasons for supporting the project.

Why I dislike Microsoft

Do I dislike Microsoft?

There are many people who hate Microsoft fundamentally. They build conspiracy theories. They plot the downfall of the company. They seek to replace it. They spread the worst evils of Microsoft's past. Somehow, they feel that if only Microsoft were gone, life would be better. Whether things would be better or not, they cannot know, but they believe it.

There are those who love Microsoft. They ignore any evil done by the company, and they believe that choices in design, marketing, and development are excellent. They would put the blame for problems on the heads of the enemies of the company, and on developers who don't follow proper practices. They seek to protect the company at every step.

I dislike absolutes. When you deal with absolutes, odds are that you are wrong. And anyway, Microsoft is not Evil. It is not capable of being evil. It is a corporation, and as such, ambivalent to either goodness or evilness. They simply are not capable of it. So why should I hate Microsoft? They are not evil. They are simply capitalist.

However, they are not out to protect anyone except their bottom line. They are after money. Microsoft and its employees will do what they think best to earn the most money. Unfortunately, some of what they are willing to do is actually quite unfortunate. If you want something bad enough, there is a good chance that you will become a bully, willing to do whatever it takes, and hurt anybody in your way. If they do this, does that make Microsoft evil? Not really, however evil their methods.

The things they have been doing, though, deserve comment. Looking back now at Windows Phone 7, it is basically a flop of a product. It didn't sell, except for a handful here and there. They may be fighting to bring it back, but really, it hasn't gained traction, and there is nothing drawing people to it. It simply exists by itself. So in order to make up for it, they seem to have decided to do what they can to gouge the competition. They are charging you and I to use somebody else's software, namely Android. The curious thing about how is by going to companies, threatening lengthy court battles, and forcing them to not tell anybody else about it so that each company using Android has to fight on their own. Whether or not it would stand up in court doesn't matter, because most companies can't afford the fight as long as Microsoft can. Yet they're trying to get every Android device manufacturer to do it. Why not Apple? Because Apple is bigger than Microsoft now. They may sell fewer PCs, but they sell at a higher profit thanks to Vertical Integration and more entertainment devices. And why are they not suing Google directly? Google would fight them, and their patents might not be up to the task of an actual court battle. If they lost, they would never be able to even hint that Linux infringes on their Patents, because the Linux Kernel is part of the Android Kernel.

So it's simply a tactic in bullying, and I do not approve of that. I do not approve of paying Microsoft in order to use somebody else's product. And that is why I dislike Microsoft.

The Power of FLOSS

FLOSS, or Free/Libre Open Source Software, also known as FOSS, OSS, Open Source, Free Software, and so on, is Software that is provided with the source code available to the users, and allows those users to modify and redistribute that code in accordance with the licence. It is completely alien to the Proprietary way of thinking. The idea behind FLOSS is that people are free. They cannot be artificially restricted by licences. They will want to modify the code anyway, so let's make it part of the program. It is a system that encourages the sharing of code with the expectation that anybody who uses it will do so in order to learn from it, or make it better, and by so doing improve things for everybody.

I was drawn into this community through Linux, and through business. My business is IT, and in order to make things work the best possible for my clients, I need the best tools, and if they happen to be the least expensive, so much the better for my clients. While searching for these tools, I stumbled across the concepts of open source software, and discovered the power and strength of the community as compared to the corporation. I am not going to say that one is better, that community always triumphs over the corporation, or that corporations are inherently superior. That conversation is already settled, with neither as being inherently better. But the community is a natural strength, because it is not limited in the way a corporation is limited. A corporation may have greater focus, but it lacks the diversity of a community.

The reason I am drawn ever more within the open source community is however a belief that all people have value, and they are all part of the community. They are all part of my community, the global community. They are all working for freedom, and freedom is the basic right of humanity. So often, corporations are so focused on protecting what is theirs, that they seek to strip us of our rights. If we agree to give up those rights, then that is our individual decision, but those rights exist, and they must not be taken away from us. The right to learn is ours, the right to share what is ours, and use the tools that we have available to us without fear of reprisal. The right to speak our minds, which can best be protected by the community, and not the corporations. The right to believe what we please, whether I agree with your beliefs, or find them to be evil. Those are rights I fear to lose. Those are rights that could too easily be stripped from us if we put our trust in corporations. Corporations have no interest in my life, or protecting freedoms, they have interest in profit. All well and good, that is the reason corporations exist. But they cannot be trusted. They will sell my rights if I give them away. They will turn my data over to the right bidder. And that is why I advocate for Open Source. I own myself.