I love open source, no just software but open source information. Blogging is a great form of being open and sharing information code and techniques, I love the way bloggers just get out there and say it! I have been told that I give too much away about our domain than I should, I was told this by a designer who works for one of the largest web design companies local to me, goes without saying their designs are dull and coded using tables.

Open source Goodness

Many pieces of software I love and rely on are open source and even I run my whole business model around open source publishing platforms. Wordpress in-particular but I have used many more open source projects; Moodle, BBPress, Open Workbench, Joomla, Linux, Drupal, also lets not forget the very languages we use to program the Internet; (X)HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL, without this open source mainframe the I doubt the Internet would have been as progressive.

Software Patents

The new/old threat boils down to software patents, a subject that has had a lot of press over the years whether they should even exist is a grey area for most. Basically there are 2 camps on this issue; Camp 1: If we never had software patents what would stop people copying the code and calling it their own. Camp 2: Software patents are slowing down progression in our domain and allowing exterionate pricing.

Where do I stand

As usual some where in the middle. I fully appreciate that software and application designers spend lots of time, resources and money on developing their software and applications and they deserve the full credit and royalties that follow. On the other hand if the product were open source then it would no doubt progress alot faster and would be a better quality product. But If developers released applications for free then a lot of us would be out of work. Then again why should we spend so much money on overpriced software and applications when the open source equivalents are almost as good or even in some cases better.

Microsoft Back off!

I think it goes without saying though that suing a fellow Operating System (Linux) for having a lot of features and applications and code that the Windows Operating System uses is a massive contradiction as we all know the story of how Microsoft gutted and re-used the Apple Operating System.

Big Thank You

I wanted to give a big shout out to all the above mentioned open source products and languages that I use, without XHTML, CSS and LAMP technologies in particular I would not be able to afford a lifestyle and a domain that I love working within.