Introduction to Understanding Linux and the Idea of Open or Free Source Software
Since I stated a lot of things about Free and/or Open Source software in class today, the professor encouraged me to blog about each of the topics and ideas I mentioned.
So let’s begin by explaining why the development of Linux Operating System (OS) in the 1990s was so profound. This was an operating system that was created in response and to prevent the further privatization and commercialization of other operating systems. If you don’t know what exactly an OS is, then think about it in terms of when you buy a laptop for example, where you are automatically given an operating system. Say if you purchased a Dell laptop with it you will be given a Microsoft OS, where it will have features like Internet Explorer (I will expand on this in another blog).
Linux was a response to these kinds of OS that required users to pay for upgrades or anything that was wrong with the software to get it fix. Linux was a solution to this; a creation that in effect was against the copyright “regime.”
Very quickly one can see the FOSS movement as a social justice issue. It is about freedom to obtain, manipulate, modify, distribute and so on information.
Open or Free Source Software (I will explain in another post why these two words are used interchangeably or as I put here as “or”) created a chance for a new kind of culture and a different kind of production. There is no wage labour here as is used in the physical world. It is about a group of people known as “hackers” (a term I will describe in another post), who collaborate and write computer programs and other code and as a community own the rights to it.
If one wants to expand on this movement outside of software, you can look at new debates emerging between privacy vs security. This debate is all about the issue of using technology and software to be able to data mine consumers, which then leads to data aggregation. But this is a huge debate that I will not be going into.
Hopefully this explains to some of you who are not very knowledgeable about software to begin to understand what this commons is about.
-Sukhpal