Tuesday, October 13, 2015

The Open Source Revolution

12 years ago after experiencing yet another blue screen of death, I decided to switch to GNU/Linux. That is how I progressively built an interest and ultimately a passion for Open Source.

As you may know, Open Source softwares allow users to freely access and modify the source code, as opposed to proprietary softwares where only the owners can do that. Thanks to the Internet, this enables collaboration at a planetary scale.

Questions often arise such as: how to make money with Open Source? I'm not gonna discuss that. That might even be a bogus question. It's clear that as measure as Open Source spreads, the role of money is shifting anyway.

So, back to the main topic: the Open Source Revolution is happening! We already know how pervasive GNU/Linux is in the tech industry. But what about other sectors where a much smaller portion of the users are techies, like say the music software industry? Well, something unprecedented has recently happened. A manufacturer (and a darn good one) of professional mixing consoles, Harrison, has chosen to build the software part of their product based on Ardour, an Open Source Digital Audio Workstation. As a consequence, they can sell the software part at an unbeatable price, and of course they use some of their benefits to invest back into Ardour's development.

Another recent cool project, OpenBazaar. An Open Source alternative to Ebay! Or YaCy, an Open Source P2P web search engine (although, it's coded in Java, I hardly think it's gonna succeed, but at least they are trying!)

Personally, I have no doubt that the rise of Open Source is gonna come with a raise of awareness, ultimately leading to a more collaborative, creative, efficient and free world. And, as I hope you agree, we can already see the early signs of it!