I have the great luck of having a fairly large tech following on Twitter. However, there are maybe a few people over there who aren't of the tech world. And while I'm flattered that they follow me despite my tweets containing some of the most complex tech jargon imaginable, I realised they don't understand one of the basic things I love talking about - Open Source. So, I figured, why not write on Open Source - what it is, and why it's important to me.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a great place to start when I explain Open Source. Wikipedia is one of the most "open" places on the Internet - and I don't mean open in terms of access. On Wikipedia, users can propose changes to existing content, or add new content altogether. These changes are reflective of a giant decentralised community effort to just "make stuff" without financial motives. Wikipedia, and the people maintaining articles, is a product of people's passion and their obsession with maintaining the biggest public (and open) library of our time.
Open Source
Open Source is a lot like Wikipedia. In the context I use it in (nerdy tech talk), Open Source refers to software which is just as open as Wikipedia. And by that, the source code (the human-readable code making up the software) is easily available online. This means anyone can copy the code and run the software on their own computers. In a lot of cases, I also refer to Open Source Software as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) - where Free represents freedom, and not the cost. The freedom to do what you want with the source code.
"Think free as in free speech, not free beer." - Richard Stallman
The real awesomeness of FOSS is how the community around the software is free to contribute in whatever way they can. This can be contributions in code, or even in something as "simple" as documentation. I, as some random internet person, can take some code for some software I like, and can make improvements to it, or add new features, or fix this bug which has been bugging me for a while.
Why I Like FOSS
On top of the openness letting anyone contribute code to some existing software, FOSS has the advantage of, well, not necessarily being corporate owned (or at least partially independent from our capitalist/monopolist overlords). For simplicity's sake, I will just skip over the corporate side of Open Source and the politics and discourse and whatever else money and shareholders bring upon the world.
Another cool part of FOSS is that, because of it's openness, it is extremely transparent. For example, not so long ago, a malicious contributor slid some code into Linux which let them login to any server with that vulnerability without needing a password. But, because this code is extremely transparent, someone caught on what was going on and the backdoor was caught and patched. This is a contrast to closed source software where you have no idea who has access to what, and which 3 letter agencies have backdoor access to your machine (cough cough Windows cough cough).
Contributing to FOSS
On a technical note, a lot of the FOSS projects out there live on Github. While I don't expect you to know what a Git is (other than a british insult), Github serves as possibly the largest collaboration platform out there. Here's Krita, an Open Source alternative to Photoshop: https://github.com/KDE/krita
For comparing with the Wikipedia history I showed above, here's a part of the Krita contribution history!
Why You Should Try FOSS
So maybe you're not a developer. And you're not interested in all the techy details, or the politics behind FOSS. But, even as a user, FOSS gives you added freedom and shelter from the big-brotherness which many for-profit companies have been pushing recently. No more are you tied to a company's whims (or that of their greedy shareholders). No more are you tied to restrictive licenses and agreements. No more is your data also the data of the company. And, even better, it gives you the community of other enthusiasts who love the software and will spend hours in forums helping you do something tricky.
Everyone has their reasons for using FOSS. I'm in this camp for the freedom of use, privacy, and the freedom to tell the pervasive tech conglomerates to get lost.