Future-proofing your business
The Bigger They Are …
maddog examines why students should use free and open source technologies when learning the basics of computing.
This is a landmark year for me: 40 years in computing (almost all of it using "open source"), 29 years using Unix, and 15 years using Linux (or GNU/Linux to some people). Most of those 15 years I have spent talking and writing articles about using free software. In fact, I have been using the same program to do my text editing for a quarter century because it steadily improves and is available on many systems.
One of my discussion points for free software is always "longevity." I have pointed out to many people that the software industry is a relatively young industry and that, in a lot of cases we are not only putting our collective eggs into one basket, but we appear to be using genetically modified chickens with a lock on the hen house door. If a disaster comes, we might not be able to reproduce our "chickens."
Free software, however, has much in common with free-range chickens – gradual improvement by cross-breeding, open sharing of blood lines, and free and open exchange of results. From time to time, we might lose a chicken to a wild animal, but the overall improvement of the chickens goes on.
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