digg

Join DiggAbout

Discover the best of the web!
Learn more about Digg by taking the tour.

Open Source: changing the world and web

pacer.utm.edu — "Let ’s face it, not everyone is a tech junkie at this stage in their life (I know that I am not) but the further one gets in their college career, the closer we get to the corporate realm, and it is important to note one of the most interesting tech issue revolutionizing our world, open source programming."

Bury
show profanity settings
expand all
  • Celeron, on 10/12/2007, -21/+8Open source ftw.
    • koonkii, on 10/12/2007, -10/+10i dont know if its just me... but any comment that includes " FTW" is ***** annoying
      "for the win" could almost be considered fanboyism on a generalised scale
    • r2d7, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7It would be nice if an original article could be written instead of the same old rhetoric that usually gets voted up.
    • kurth, on 10/12/2007, -11/+9FTW? I was under the impression that FTW meant "***** The World" after visiting my local tattoo shop, and talking to the owner about the kinds of tattoos that people get. His comment was that he used to cover a lot of F.T.W. tattooed on old man hands, and forearms and arms.

      So parent read to me "Open Source ***** The World".

      I hope my mother doesn't read Digg, she'd be upset that I swore in front of total strangers.
    • r2d7, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Following on cause my edit timed out ...

      The author specifically has delusions about open source software and basically spouts generic opinions about the ideology rather than reality.

      The misconception that open source is free is just silly and damaging to the businesses built around it.

      The ***** about closed source being likely to have some unknown programmer swoop in and "delete bits" is just mind blowing ....

      Limewire is invaluable to college students' NEEDS???

      It's just more ***** indiscriminately voted to the front page.
    • SundayTrain, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0ftw? open source, "free as in beer" or "free as in free speech" is going to be the the next phase in sd dev as well as desktop usage. Windows is beautiful and Mac is even better graphically but the Open Source destroys are becoming a major compete. Revenue is generated from proprietary device development (extensible Python) and package managers "Canonical". It's great to be both free and Open Source but the business will be in development for proprietary development for software apps that will be certified to run in that environment. Canocal is one example of this. Ubuntu is free as in Freedom but not free as in beer and therefore, there is a market to run on. The "backside" or leech on to the open source whale. It's not wrong , just a new approach! Nothing adverse and adhering to CoC! I love Ubuntu, but there are flaws....

      SundayTrain "cracker soul!"
      Win3.1 ,95, SuSs Dev ,.Net dev and fmr. msDEV
      and of course earlier days "YAM", cpt crnch#1 before Digg on Delphi! Grdn!
    • SundayTrain, on 10/12/2007, -6/+101001001 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100110 01110010 01100101 01100101 00101110 00100000 01100011 01110100 01110100 01100110 01111110 00100001
    • jgtg32a, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I am still free. cttf~!

      Don't be annoying
    • hakrzcode, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Open Source is free as in speech, not free as in beer. Free as in beer is for the leechers.
  • grapeape25, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2Woah, that's surprising
  • MicroBerto, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10That's cool to get it into a school newspaper.

    The only thing I would tell the writer and students are to think VERY HARD if they truly want to become a cog in the corporate machine.

    Working for a corporation is not the only option after college. Maybe the best-paying stable one, but perhaps not the one that brings the most freedom and happiness, if you ask me.
    • drag, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Depends what you mean by 'corporation'.

      If you want to work for a living, your going to work in a corporation. It's just a sort of legal status for a group of people. That is you create a company that has a legal status appart from you. You can have non-profit corporations, business corporations, religious corporations, etc etc. It's not all just for making investors rich.

      For instance say you start a store front and have everything in your name. Somebody trips over a crack in the sidewalk in front of your store and then sues you. You loose and you loose your house, your car, you kid's education, etc etc.

      However if you start a corporation for business and have that buy the store and you get sued the corporation goes bankrupt. Your still ruined, but your isolated from a lot of the devastation. This sort of setup is allows people to screw up and go out of business and not be completely ruined. If you ever seen the history of typically successfull entrepreneur people you'll notice that most of them go through cycles were they are utterly poor and owe everybody money to other times were they could buy a BMW with their pocket change. They survive by taking risks and trying out new ideas and new businesses. Every once in a while somebody figures out something good and they get rich and provide jobs for hundreds or even thousands of people (which makes the whole thing worthwhile) Corporation status allows them to get money and take risks and such.

      So even very small businesses are usually corporations. My second job was working for one guy with one other part time employee and that was a corporation.

      Of course what your talking about is probably mega corporations. Stuff you see publicly traded on the stock market and such... Well in that case I don't blame you. I wouldn't want to work for one of those places either. No fun. But that's ok and most other people feel the same way, the vast majority of people don't work for big corporations.
    • dave_colorado, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1@drag:

      I really like your post. It's very insightful and shows that you've been around. However, you really need to work on spelling and grammar. It's painful to read when there are so many errors.
    • kettlechips, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1See me after class
  • Nick22, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Funny how he mentions limewire on there. Knowing what schools are like, i wouldnt be surprised if he got in trouble for that. And limewire isnt opensource i dont think
    • coldphoenix, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3yea i don't think limewire is open source either
    • coldphoenix, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7check that, should have done my research, limewire is in fact open source
    • eqisow, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It is. In fact, it's even been forked. Frostwire is a free (as in cost) fork of Limewire that promises never to implement copyright filters even if the original Limewire does.
  • coldphoenix, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12anyone else think that article sounded very amateur? almost like a highschool english paper, with all that proper 5 paragraph style and everything
    • robweber, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2yea, it hink it was badly wrtten, with many parts that don't reallly make and sense with each other. it kind of just jumps from one thing to the next.
    • kettlechips, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Gambling gains popularity among students
  • bayonetblaha, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11hey, the title of this article glorifies open-source, and I use linux. I think I'll digg it right away.
  • d2nd, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6This has to be one of the worst articles I have ever read, has absolutely no place on the front page.

    Second and third paragraphs are all about Microsoft Office, yet there is no mention of Open Office. Instead he offers:

    "Even better, many open source programs are invaluable to the needs of college students. For example, many students now use LimeWire, an open source program for their peer-to-peer downloading needs."

    LimeWire, really? somehow i doubt its the hot p2p app at UTenn at Martin, to call it invaluable to the needs of students is absurd.


    • DonPMitchell, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Read paragraph two again: "However, the open source equivalent OpenOffice can be tweaked and upgraded by a wide range of programming experts, and offers the same service."

      What worries me about Open Source is the long-term effect of undermining business incentives for doing software R&D. Take MS Office for example. Microsoft has spent enormous resources developing these applications, testing them, doing endless useability studies and customer studies and readability studies. They even commision font designs.

      Now along comes Open Office. They do no R&D at all, because they have a ready-made template to copy. Reverse engineer MS Office, and they have an instant product, a word processor, a spread sheet, etc. Open office's typography engine produces exactly the same layout as Microsoft Office. And to add insult to injury, the Open Office formats, which mimic the functionality of Microsoft's formats, are now declared a standard, and MS's formats are even banned by some governments.

      So let's say MS Office is driven out of business by the free alternative? Every open-source fanboy's wet dream. Where does the next major product concept and R&D come from for a totally new product? I guess the standard (but bogus) answer is that the community of random programmers will spontaneously invent the next big thing. We are waiting, but so far I just see open source doing ersatz copies of commercially developed products like Office, Photoshop, Visual Studio, etc.
    • darthmdh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@DonPMitchell:

      "Where does the next major product concept and R&D come from for a totally new product?"

      Where they always have come from, and always should come from - some legitimate need that needs to be met / problem that needs to be solved.

      Many companies have gotten away with creating products solely for marketing purposes, and call shifting the menus around so they can make buttloads more money re-training end-users (eg - every version of Microsoft Office since its inception) as "R&D". I can't do anything in Word 2003 that I couldn't do with WordPerfect 5.1, it just takes a lot longer, produces significantly larger files wasting my filespace, and I need 300x the hardware requirements to do it.
    • zoxed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@DonPMitchell:

      > They even commision font designs.

      Which they copyright.

      > Now along comes Open Office. They do no R&D at all, because they have a ready-made template to copy. Reverse engineer MS Office, and they have an instant product, a word processor, a spread sheet, etc.

      So, what, MS Word was the first ever wordprocessor ? And eXcel the first every spreadsheet ? OpenOffice.org came from StarOffice: was that before or after MS Word ? It is however true that OOo have adopted a lot of the MS menu structure: primarily due to user request.

      > Open office's typography engine produces exactly the same layout as Microsoft Office.

      I am not sure how it could be significantly different.

      > And to add insult to injury, the Open Office formats, which mimic the functionality of Microsoft's formats, are now declared a standard, and MS's formats are even banned by some governments.

      Important different: they are declared an *Open* standard, because they are (fully) open. A Close format can never be a standard.

      > Where does the next major product concept and R&D come from for a totally new product? I guess the standard (but bogus) answer is that the community of random programmers will spontaneously invent the next big thing.

      So where did TCP/IP, HTML, email, ftp, P2P clients, Wikipedia, RSS etc come from ? A commercial vendor: no not a single one. AFAIK commercial entities have *never* produced a *software* leap: it always comes from govt. research, and/or hackers. What companies *are* good at is refining, packaging and marketing software. And sometimes they can provide decent support. But step changes ?

      (But hardware is they opposite !!)
  • Nick22, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Actualy if you read it and didnt skim through you would see he actualy does say you can get open office instead of microsoft office, which can cut down alot on stuff you have to pay for for school
    • d2nd, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1i stand corrected, but still a ***** article
    • jawbreaker4fs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3How many college students buy Microsoft Office anyway? I know my university has a site license and gave me a copy. Even without this, I'm sure they could just burn it from a friend/relative.
  • p0ss, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1no news, but a short introduction for those who are new to open source. Strange that it didn't mention firefox, for a more indepth look and for more examples, please refer to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software
  • brettalton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Many times most of the codes for a great deal of open source programs are closely guarded by knowledgeable professionals. The ramifications of this mean that some unknown person could not just swoop in and delete valuable bits of code and destroy an entire program in one fell click of a mouse. The cracks are minute, but code can slip though from time to time. So, for now, open source is not completely fallible."

    Does anyone agree with that? I don't.. it doesn't even make sense. He even makes heavy use of a thesaurus lol.
    • 1coreduo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4But there is no better place to learn how to code, than open source. if you make mistake, there are thousands of people willing to correct that mistake and you can learn (if you are willing to do so)
      With closed source there are just a few people correcting you, if any ...
      I have learned coding thru open source ...
  • d2nd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6yeah, it is exceptionally poor. don't really like to judge institutions, but im not surprised at such poor quality from a "Staff Writer" at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Its actually so bad i was driven to read something else he wrote, this is from his article "Browser Wars: To Tab or Not to Tab":

    "Otherwise, it seems as if Microsoft has finally caught on to the future of web browsing … Now it just needs to catch up."

    sorry Jon-Michael St. Amant, but you cant write for *****.
  • ruggerkets15, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Anything to drive down the costs of texts is good news.
    • CurtHowland, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I look forward to when the Gutenberg Project starts putting text books online. Newton's mathematics texts are just as valid today as they were when he wrote them. By Cromm, I love the Public Domain!

  • r2d7, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1
  • crackmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Honestly I am impressed. The guy has overcome some serious physical and mental disabilities to serve on the school newspaper. After his car accident and the brain trauma that resulted he was able to graduate from high school with a 3.4 and do what many of us who are not so limited struggle to do. I say kudos to him. It appears that his classmates are indeed proud of him and have been digging away.
  • iamausername, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I think our social economic structure needs to change before open source software gets into business, as businesses like paying for things so they have something legal to fall back on should something break, or should they need something fixed.

    I love open source software, as it is people contributing to the world for no other reason than they want to. (don't analyse this, I know its not always the case).

    maybe software developers will find a way to make products and profits, without having to keep their secrets guarded. (and yes I know some companies do)

    this is a good reason why I respect google, although i'm sure its searching algorithyms are closely guarded secrets, it supports open source software.

    I also agree that open source software is not "free" for businesses as they use a term "total cost of ownership" which represents its cost overall.
  • animewars, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The article was rather basic and seemed to be kind of "over generalized". I was hoping for something a little bit more.

    However, this would be something that I would send a friend or parent or relative who doesn't have much (or no) knowledge in this certain area. Especially since I have difficulty converting my thoughts into the words necessary to explain them.
    • savio13, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Actually, I think this is a pretty poor article. The best way to get your friends or family accustomed to open source is to get them to use it. i.e. send them a link to firefox and show/help them install a few extensions (like Adblock!) and the rest will take care of itself.
  • mikebritton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I love open source, but this is tripe!
    • dave_colorado, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1you learn something new everyday - i thought you were looking to use the word "trite", but upon looking up the word "tripe", i learned a new word!

      i orginially thought of "tripe" as tendons you order at chinese hot pot or vietnamese pho noodles.
  • jgtg32a, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2whoops we need a delete post option
    • i440, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I concur.
    • darthmdh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Unfortunately this would mean the entire internet would be deleted as everyone who didn't agree with something someone else says just goes ahead and deletes it.

      Wait a minute, perhaps that isn't so bad after all ;)
  • JrGhoull, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0not too shabby of an article...though i would've liked it better if it went into a more in debt look into the subtle differences between open sourced and non open sourced (whats the correct term for non open source anyway? closed sourced?)
    • darthmdh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"whats the correct term for non open source anyway?"

      Legacy.
    • danielgary, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Legacy"

      No. Proprietary.
  • wittyguysuku, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is always been a debate for years and years. Moreover Limewire is a open source software which many comments opposes.

    In fact, I read through in an article that open source business is a next big money generating business. But I wonder, how do open source software companies can generate money, when they make 'free as in free speech' softwares?
    • zoxed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Making money:

      - selling ads (eg Google)
      - services: installation, configuration etc e.g. for Apache, Sendmail
      - distos: SUSE etc are free, but they also manage to sell it
      - Sun StarOffice is sold (OOo ++)
      - Linux helps sell IBM hardware, other companies use it in set-top boxes, PDAs, phones etc so they contribute back
    • leohart, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thinking of how Open Source is getting matured faster than many software out there (yes, I mean YOU Microsoft Windows). There will be time when business realizes that they don't need MS Word to do text-editting. Then, where will be that cash-cow for selling software? The money is in service, maintenance, customization, ....
  • fullback, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"...but the further one gets in their college career..."

    College is not a career, hopefully.
  • icekin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"..Wikipedia, used by many as a research assistant, is another open source program.."

    Wikipedia is not a program, though its content is under GNU FDL.
  • jonst, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Well I really like all the comments given by the Digg nation. I was even surprised my story made it to digg. I would however like to address some concerns I have seen.

    First, my story was not full of rhetoric to get to the front page. I actually wrote it for our weak A&E section. As for the banter, I did not have a lot of column space to write everything there is to know about open source, but I did want to inform the hicks of west tennessee that there is a lot of cool stuff going down in the tech world.

    I apologize to many of you who wanted me to give more and be more specific. I just didn't have the room. But please go to pacer.utm.edu and look at the "technophile" section we have recently added, I believe there is a wealth of neat "digg-able" columns on there.

    Also, if you don't like my writing, sorry. You have to some times dumb it down a bit for the folks here, especially about technology related matters.

    Please continue to comment about this story. The comments are insightful, useful, and I am learning a lot from what everyone has to say.

    Best Regards,
    JMS
  •  

    Login or register to add a comment

    Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.


© Digg Inc. 2008 — Content posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain.
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.