Open to all

Thanks to the advent of Open Source you no longer have to go out and buy expensive software if you want to get work done at home or in the office. Gareth Van Zyl explains all...

Open what?

Open source software (OSS) had its first public outing in the form of a marketing campaign for free software. OSS is now defined as computer software that has its source-code - used to develop the program - available under a copyright license that meets the Open Source Definition.

The definition is used by the Open Source Initiative to decide whether or not a particular piece of software can actually be considered Open Source.

Open source allows any user to use, modify, upgrade and redistribute the software as he or she sees fit. Generally open source programs are developed in public groups where numerous people contribute to the software's development.

The adoption of OSS has picked up steam over the last few years. Venezuela, 2004: President Hugo Chavez issues a decree to adopt OSS in Venezuela's public administration sphere. Along with Venezuela, Brazil and many other South American countries have pushed for OSS to be used in government ministries and state-run entities for years now.

Questions and answers

The question arises. Is this ‘push' for open source software in these countries just a leftist leaning towards avoiding commercialised software, or is it a suggestion that the rest of the world is a missing a trick? Should more people consider becoming ‘Linux-converts' for instance? In this feature, Windows examines as to just how practical it is to make the change-over to using a Linux-based operating system and other open source programs.

Before establishing whether it is practical or not to make the change-over, an initial consideration involves thinking about what most of us are actually using our computers for. Most people purchase computers that have a few commercial program products that are the ‘common denominators' of our digital lives.

We all use an operating system such as Microsoft Windows. We all typically also need an office program such as Microsoft Office to type up those work documents or to keep track of our budget in an Excel spreadsheet document. And what would a computer be without Microsoft Internet Explorer or Microsoft Outlook.

Then there are our digital photos that we store on our computers' hard drives. Sometimes we just want to crop or touch up a photo, and sometimes we just want to play around a bit and add text to photographs. More often that not, this prompts people to go out and purchase image manipulation software, such as Adobe Photoshop.

Once we've done with editing our photos or saving our work documents, there could be the task of sometimes ‘zipping' those files into compressed formats so that we can save them onto disk or even email them to others. Purchasing a program such as WinZip is a good option for this purpose.

Veering away then from all these commonly used programs results in altering a computer's ‘personality'. But if you are keen on traversing this open source course, you could start with the all important ‘brains' of your computer: the operating system.

When it comes to open source operating systems, there is one word: Linux. The kernel, the heart of all Linux systems, is developed and released under the General Public License (GPL) and its source code is freely available.

The kernel forms the base around which a Linux OS is developed, and there are numerous companies, organisations and even individuals who have released their own versions of operating systems based on the Linux kernel.