Is Open Source In Your Future?

by Christine Hall

Do you consider yourself to be an “alternative” person? Do you resent the hold that mainstream “traditional” medicine holds over the health care system, at the expense of alternative treatments like homeopathy, herbalism, and acupuncture? Do you gripe about the fact that big chains like Wal-Mart and Borders have all but driven local community based merchants out of business? Do you think there's something drastically wrong when a company like Enron can amass and lose billions of dollars buying and selling oil without producing a single drop? Are you appalled because your supermarket's shelves are filled with produce from another hemisphere when locally grown crops rot in the field for lack of a market?

If you are such a person, you probably do your best to be a force for change. No doubt, you incorporate alternative healing systems into you health care and try to shop with local mom and pop businesses whenever possible. You conserve nonrenewable resources and try to buy your produce from farmers' markets, holistic food stores and other venues that support local farmers. But what about your computer? What have you done to break the monopoly that Microsoft and other purveyors of proprietary software hold on your PC? In other words, do you embrace and support the Open Source movement?

Microsoft, of course, wants to be to computers what Ma Bell used to be to the telephone business. They want to control every aspect of the desktop computing experience, through use of software that they control and which cannot be modified by the user. So far they've been highly successful. Unless you're one of the small percentage of people who owns an Apple product, Microsoft controls how your computer works through the Windows operating system. In addition, anybody who needs to create word processing documents or spreadsheets that can be read by others is beholden to Office, Microsoft's exorbitantly priced office productivity suite, a fact that's true even for Mac users. Now, with their .Net project under development, they want to eventually process every purchase made over the Internet.

Anyone who uses Internet Explorer to surf the net is using Microsoft's “free” browser that's included with Windows and the Mac OS. Anyone running XP, the newest version of Windows, is probably listening to music using Windows Media Player, which is now embedded in the operating system as another “free” application. Through MSN, Microsoft is even trying to unseat AOL as the dominant Internet service provider.

The consumer pays dearly for this. When a computer is purchased with Windows and MS Works (Microsoft's toy version of Office), the most common configuration for home PC purchases, those components are included in the price of the computer. Computer industry insiders say that the price of bottom-of-the-line PCs can't drop below about $450 because of this “Microsoft tax.” These same insiders, however, claim that the $350 personal computer is coming soon, and that this will be made possible through Open Source software.

Although the open source, or free software, idea has been around since the early days of the personal computer, it was largely an anarchistic, unorganized movement until early 1998, when Netscape announced they were going to give away the source code for their browser in the hopes that the hacker community would help them improve it. Soon after that, on February 3, a meeting took place in Palo Alto, California, attended by the heavy hitters of the free software movement, that eventually resulted in the adoption of the term Open Source and the development of the General Public License (GPL) as a copyright model for freely shared software.

Software licensed under the GPL is freely available to everyone. Developers are allowed to modify the code to suit their own needs, as long as the modified code is returned to the software's owners so they can incorporate it into future releases if they wish. Oddly enough, this hippie fantasy of independent software developers freely exchanging their code was almost immediately embraced by big business. With Open Source, they found a way to obtain software that could be easily and cheaply modified to fit their individual needs; something that had not been possible with commercially purchased proprietary software.

Today, a sizable percentage of servers on the Internet utilize Open Source software. Internet giants like Yahoo have discovered that they can drastically cut costs and gain profitability by relying on GPL software to run their sites. It's a win-win situation, since every time a Yahoo improves the software, those improvements become immediately available to everyone.

Adoption of Open Source software by consumers has been slow, but now the time has come for consumers to break the bonds of Microsoft by adopting this model on the desktop.