ubuntu-us-ohio team mailing list archive

["Nicholas Lawson" <nicholas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ubuntu OH: 

 

I am working on generating a small amount of literature for the function at
Media Bridges and have been trying  to download my thoughts into a cohesive
form for dissemination to my Public Media Community. I would be interested
to know how you feel about the following paragraphs and whether or not you
think I as a non developer understand the premises that your FOSS community
adheres to:


Do you agree with the following and if not what would you change and why?

 

Open Source Introduction:

 

The Open Source Mindset is one of altruism. It is an efficient mindset that
channels ones talents and abilities into a community in extremely pragmatic
and organized fashion. Here at Media Bridges we are interested in becoming
immersed into this Open Source Community and would like to embrace the
mindset and the culture that the Open Source world adheres to. The main
point that I would like to stress when organizatinonally enterting into a
relationship with the FOSS commuinty and to realize that you and your
organization can itself become involved in the community and influence the
direction that the software evolves in. Embrace the idea of fostering
relationships with the developers who are creating your software and think
more community and less retail. Retail software wants your money and wants
to give you software and then that is the end of the transaction. The Open
Source Software community is much different. You can download the software
you think is good for you, email the developers and get direct feedback from
the creators and then you could for instance send them a small gift thanking
them for their work and intermingle with them in the IRC Chatrooms that they
frequent. You can enter into a relationship with the FOSS community where
the retail software world has more proprietary secrets to hold back from you
the FOSS world has no barriers to their information.

 

FOSS gives you access to all of the source code that is available for a
piece of software and if you so choose and have the ability you can alter
the code to serve your needs and then you can offer your changes to the FOSS
community in the spirit of sharing your improvements with others who may be
interested in the same solutions as yourself. The Open Media Project is an
example of this ethic at work in the Public Media world where Drupal has
been chosen as a Content Management System. Over the last three years the
Community Media Community has in pockets been creating a set of online
components that add functionality to the Drupal CMS in such a way that crews
can be managed and developed for production, equipment can be organized for
distribution, and distribution schedules can be arranged by the community.
The FOSS community and its ethics allows for a number of stations to
collaborate and create solutions among them that make their lives easier and
because the product is information management once the solution is found and
developed it is then instantly available to all participating parties and is
even available to all non participating parties. The FOSS is interesting
because it exists outside of the world of high finance. It would seem that
originally before the internet was developed it was necessary for pockets of
programmers to work in conjunction with each other in close quarters in
order to develop software because they needed a way to communicate and learn
from each other and they needed appropriated space to do this hence
Microsoft and IBM. With the advent of the internet these collectives could
be competed with by pockets of programmers using the internet as their
organizing catalyst with the intent of developing solutions that exist in
spaces where finance is not necessary to deliver quality concepts. Linux is
an example of a product that has been created by a community of developers
using the tools available to them. 

 

Ubuntu itself is a flavor of Linux that is an attempt to create an operating
system that can overthrow the Microsoft Windows operating system as the most
used operating system in the world of computers. The reason why it makes
sense that this is not unachievable is because the software operates on FOSS
principles. These principles when adhered to allow for the highest levels of
innovation and quality production because the entire community that accepts
the FOSS community can become involved in the building of something
essentially perfect. The community of Ubuntu is creating a solution that is
already receiving high accolades and it literally has forever to mature and
develop and on a long enough timeline the FOSS system overtakes all other
models of software development because the FOSS community is operating out
of altruism and is building a foundation for itself that is much firmer than
retail volume controlled software. 

 

Nicholas

513 312 5204