2008 Woodie Awards
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World of open-source software continues to evolve
John Wenz
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Consumers can spend hundreds of dollars on software, only to discover they can’t port it between machines or their software is soon eclipsed by its newer, shinier version or simply that it’s a clunker altogether.
So what are they to do in a sea of competing software?
There’s always the choice to buck paying for software altogether, and this time in perfectly legal means with open-source licensed software.
Open-Source software recommendations: Eliot Phillips, an anchor for Netscape.com and owner of HackADay.com, weighs in on some of the most powerful computer programs available, completely free. GIMP – An alternative to Photoshop and other, more expensive photo editing and manipulating software. “I have a license of Photoshop from work. I had to re-install the software on my computer recently, and I didn’t even bother with Photoshop,” Phillips said. Firefox – A browser based on the Netscape shell that Phillips regards as the best current browser. Open Office – An alternative to the Microsoft Office suite or other similar programs. “That’s pretty much the only way to open a .doc document if you don’t own Microsoft Office,” Phillips said. Jahshaka – An open-source video editing software. “It should be at least as good as iMovie, if not better,” Phillips said. Gaim – An integrative chat client, allowing users to use AOL, MSN, Yahoo and other chat accounts at once. “(It’s) like Trillian, but Trillian isn’t free,” Phillips said. A Mac-only alternative is Adium. Phillips uses Gaim and Adium only for non-AOL accounts, as video chat is not yet enabled outside of iChat. VLC – “The video player that will do pretty much everything,” Phillips said, including now playing Windows Media Video (WMV) files, eliminating the need for the Flip for Mac Quicktime plug-in. “There’s no reason to use the other plug-in that you had to use before,” he said. |
Open-source software is that software for which the source code, the core of a program and how it works, is free and publicly available, opening a number of doors so that programmers can modify the software to their own means and, if they so choose, freely distribute it on the Internet.
“The person who created the software doesn’t care how much it costs,” said Eliot Phillips, an anchor at Netscape.com. “They want people to use it as much as possible.”
With open source, there’s no fear of piracy or the software company finding out about an illegal version of its software. Instead, the software is all built on the source code of companies who have chosen to release it.
A primary example is Mozilla Firefox, a freeware Web browser that was based on the shell of Netscape programming.
As the Internet evolved in the mid-90s from businesses and computer-savvy individuals to something for average consumers, there were a few options for Web browsers, primarily Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer ended up gaining the edge, perhaps because it came with many of the Windows systems already in place.
So to gain a foothold back, Netscape decided to do something Microsoft wouldn’t – open up its source code to computer programmers.
What came about was Mozilla Firefox, which launched in 2003 and was based on the source code to Netscape.
It brought to the forefront things like tabbed browsing, which took Microsoft until last year to catch up with.
Netscape is currently prepping to release Netscape 9. The coding of it should be familiar to many computer users.
“Within the next two months, we’re releasing Netscape 9, which is based on the Mozilla Firefox 2.0,” Phillips said. “Since it was released into the open-source world, people are still working on it, people are still developing it.”
Phillips, a 2005 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, also runs HackADay.com, a Web site that also features hardware modifications, something borrowed largely from the open-source “industry,” which constantly takes old code and rebuilds it with communitarian goals.
“Open source is built on hacking in general, which is being able to solve your own computer problems in a clever way,” he said. “We’re starting to see now open-source projects moving to the hardware side.”
Other companies have also taken wise to the open source shift. Though there are programs, like Firefox and GIMP, an image-editing program, that perform the same functions as other, more expensive programs. There are even whole operating systems that stand in opposition to Windows.
Linux is based on the GNU system, started in 1983 as a way for a free operating system to be viable. It is classified as being similar to Unix, which is the core the current Mac OS X is based on.
The Mac OS X is built on a Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. Any changes made after the UNIX system went open source do not require a revealing of the source code.
This leads to similar environments for the Mac OS X and Linux, both of which are the major competitor to Windows.
But only Linux is free.
The Husker Linux Users Group (HLUG) is a campus group to which Phillips once belonged. The current president, Martin Wolff, a junior computer science major, said that like much of the current computer community, much of the group’s activity is strictly Web based.
When Linux began to gain steam, it was largely in that way.
“Basically the Linux users groups around the nation are little organizations that pop up to help each other out,” Wolff said. “It just naturally happened that these little user groups would pop up.”
Wolff had decided during a PC upgrade that he was going to take the dive and have his new machine run solely on Linux.
It’s a decision he hasn’t regretted.
“The learning curve was extremely sharp, but once you beat that initial learning curve, you just start to float,” he said.
The learning curve has changed, Wolff said. The operating system was once usable only for skilled computer people, but now he says his mother, who is not so computer literate, can use Linux with ease.
“Originally, I would have said that Linux is for the upper crust of comp users, but it’s evolving to the point where it’s for the everyday users,” he said.
It’s this way with many of the open-source programs, one drawback that Phillips said open source has.
“There’s still certain areas of the market where there is an open-source project out there, but it’s going to have to get a lot better if it’s going to be competitive,” Phillips said.
But that can also be an advantage for the open-source world – programs like Linux that were once for the expert can be streamlined for the novice.
Additionally, other features can be incorporated, adding to the software outside of the paranoia of companies protecting their programming secrets.
“Since it was released into the open-source world, people are still working on it, people are still developing it,” Phillips said of Netscape.
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