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.