Loving OpenSource
February 15th, 2006 -
I love OpenSource and WordPress is a good example why. WordPress is the blogging platform I use for this blog. There are over 600 custom themes available and you can swap in a new one with a few clicks. Even better, there is a huge collection of plugins which you can use to customize the functionality of your blog - the ‘now reading’ section in my sidebar is an example. I can go into my Admin, enter a book name and the plugin will find the book image and link on Amazon (and stick in an affiliate code as well). I have also used a Plugin for SEO friendly titles and anti-spam plugins.
It’s users who write these features for OpenSource products, not marketers or product managers desperately trying to project a killer feature on their user. These users are driven to create features and plugins late at night and weekends. They do it because the feature is important to them and solves a particular problem or need. The same thing cannot be said for all features that come from product managers, marketing VPs and CEOs (although it should be). Moreover, many of these plugins will pertain to a small minority of users and would never get written in a commercial environment.
So now I am writing in Wordpress, browsing with FireFox, listening to music on my Squeezebox with the OpenSource Slimserver, learning to write web apps with Ruby on Rails, helping a friend build an online store with OSCommerce, learning how to PodCast with Audacity and playing Civilization (well…I had to buy something!)
I remember the days when I wanted to learn Unix and C++ on my PC. This was an expensive proposition. SCO XENIX was close to a thousand dollars. The world was different…and I don’t want to go back to that world!!!! Long live OpenSource!