Richard Stallman, unarguably is the most influential software activist in the world today. Stallman, who graduated from the MIT, is credited to start a movement that not only elevated the world of coding to a whole new level but also led to a worldwide interaction & collaboration never before seen in the history of software industry, yeah by now you must have guessed it correctly, Stallman started what later came to be know as Open Sourcing.
In 1983 , Stallman, who looks morelike a sadhu from Himalays than a software expert n activist, established the GNU project which resulted in the birth of the most famous open source software—Linux. After the launce & success of Linux this movement of open sourcing, simply put, just became a juggernaut in itself. Since then, thousands & if not millions of comp whizzies from around the world, right from Silicon valley to China, from Redmond to India, have actively contributed to open codes & thus have, bit by bit, built up a grand variety of open sofwares.
Hence, a software are no longer a thing to be stored in safety vaults, as it hitherto was. Today, an experts in china writes a code & just releases it on the Internet, from where any layman can download it, modify it (under the terms & conditions laid down by the GPL), improve it & of course use it as required. Thanks to open sourcing, the job of software coding is no longer done only by a handful of buffs sitting in Cupertino or Redmond, but is a result of interaction & combined effort of millions around the world. This had empowered an individual like never before. I no longer need to be an MS employee to write an OS, I just need a desktop & an internet connection & the whole world is mine.
This of course seems to be a very positive development, looked one way.
But there is another school of thought which is not for whatever is happening today. One result of open source is that if u write a code & release, its not yours any more. Neither do you get the credit for it nor do you have any financial reward for whatever you have done. Some people think that on an apparent sight we see that open sourcing speeds up the innovation, in a long run it is on the contrary killing it. It as said that unless you make money by selling sofwares & then redirect those funds into research & development of new software techniques, innovation wont be fired the way it has been till now.
Thus sometimes, OpenSourcing, seems to be a boon but when viewed the other way, it may as well become a curse in a long run!! Only time will tell…….
