Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi, and
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Pelett. I'm
Speaker 1: an editor here at how Stuff Works, and I've got
Speaker 1: writer Jonathan Strickland with me today. Hey there, we're calling
Speaker 1: this one the wide Open Podcast. Awesome. You gotta love
Speaker 1: open especially when you're talking about open source software, which
Speaker 1: is what we were going to discuss, um based. Basically,
Speaker 1: what happened was, after the release of Gutsy Gibbon, which
Speaker 1: is a new version of the open source Ubuntu operating system.
Speaker 1: I decided to download it, burn it on a CD
Speaker 1: and put it in my, uh my father's old PC
Speaker 1: that he gave me when he got a new one,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, actually I brought it up with him.
Speaker 1: I said, I'm gonna, you know, try this out on
Speaker 1: your old machine. You know, it's not gonna be using
Speaker 1: Windows and you know, that's just another thing that people
Speaker 1: aren't going to use. And he was saying, what's the
Speaker 1: big deal? Why should I care about open source? And
Speaker 1: I really didn't have I clean cut good podcast, Double
Speaker 1: answer for im at the time. Well, I'm glad you
Speaker 1: came into the room today because I've got one for you. Actually, Uh,
Speaker 1: well we'll talk it. First of all, what open source
Speaker 1: really means, um. Open source is a way of developing
Speaker 1: software in which the the original developer, whoever first programs
Speaker 1: the the application, uh, makes all of the source code
Speaker 1: available to anyone and everyone who wants to look at
Speaker 1: it and not just look at it, but copy it,
Speaker 1: modify it, build on it, alter it in any way
Speaker 1: they like, as long as they're also following the rules
Speaker 1: set by the Open Source Initiative, which is a group
Speaker 1: that kind of oversees the standards that are used for
Speaker 1: open source software. And the idea here is that through
Speaker 1: a community of developers, a program can evolve much faster
Speaker 1: in a much more fluid environment, uh than it would
Speaker 1: in a clothe environment. And by closed environment, we're talking
Speaker 1: about companies that have proprietary software where only their developers
Speaker 1: work on the program. We're looking at you Microsoft and Apple. Yes,
Speaker 1: particularly yes, particularly those two, especially Apple, because you know,
Speaker 1: since they build their own machines, they they're operating system
Speaker 1: takes advantage of those specific uh pieces of the computer
Speaker 1: like the processor, and the video card and the the
Speaker 1: audio card that specifically operates, which is one of those
Speaker 1: things that makes Apple computer. Why you know, people say
Speaker 1: that Apple computers just works because they always have, you know,
Speaker 1: a certain subset of of materials that're going to make
Speaker 1: the machines up right. It's not like a PC that
Speaker 1: could come from one or one manufacturer versus one thousand
Speaker 1: other manufacturers. Um, it's software that is specifically designed to
Speaker 1: work on a specific machine and so hey, what do
Speaker 1: you know? It works. But the problem is they don't
Speaker 1: share that with everybody, so no one else can really
Speaker 1: tweak anything or build anything specifically off of that software
Speaker 1: you have. It's it's much more difficult to develop software
Speaker 1: for a platform like that, and then you have, you know,
Speaker 1: bugs that come up and you have to wait for
Speaker 1: them the manufacturer to do that, rather than you know,
Speaker 1: the open source group can go ahead and get to
Speaker 1: work on it, and somebody can, you know, over their
Speaker 1: lunch break from their day job, can maybe work out
Speaker 1: a bug that has been bugging the users of that software.
Speaker 1: That's actually kind of an extension of the old hacker culture,
Speaker 1: where hackers would look at a program and say, you know,
Speaker 1: this thing is just not doing what I think it
Speaker 1: should do, not necessarily what it was designed to do,
Speaker 1: but whatever the hacker thought this program was supposed to do.
Speaker 1: And then the hacker would go hack out some code.
Speaker 1: That's where the name came from, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: by hooker by crook, that program was going to do
Speaker 1: what the hacker wanted it to do. And the same
Speaker 1: sort of thing with open source software. If you were
Speaker 1: to download a certain application that was open source and
Speaker 1: you were to use it, and you're saying, you know,
Speaker 1: this could really use such and such. There's this one
Speaker 1: feature that I really wish this had. Well, if you
Speaker 1: had the skills and the knowledge, you could program that
Speaker 1: feature and insert it into the application and make it
Speaker 1: available to everyone, and now, voila, we've got a new
Speaker 1: version of this software that something has a new feature,
Speaker 1: and we didn't have to wait three years for the
Speaker 1: next cycle of releases to come around. That's true. Yeah.
Speaker 1: An example that you may already be using UM is
Speaker 1: when when Netscape was bought by a o L, they
Speaker 1: released their source code for the Netscape browser as open source,
Speaker 1: and it is resulted in the Thunderbird email client, the
Speaker 1: Firefox browser, and somebody released the Flock browser, which incorporates uh,
Speaker 1: the ability to network your social network stuff into the browser.
Speaker 1: So you actually have a sidebar where you can check
Speaker 1: the Flicker the latest feed from Flicker or Twitter or
Speaker 1: Facebook or whatever, you know, several different accounts, and they
Speaker 1: actually just added some new ones. So they saw a
Speaker 1: need for that and just went ahead and upgraded the
Speaker 1: browser the way they thought it should be done. If
Speaker 1: you'd like to learn more about open source, we have
Speaker 1: an article called what does open source mean? We also,
Speaker 1: if you are interested in the hacker culture, Johnathan wrote
Speaker 1: an article about how hackers work, and both of those
Speaker 1: are available on how stuff works dot com. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: For moral on this and thousands of other topics. Is
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
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