Introduction to Open Source

Hey Friends!

I recently came through some open source software and started getting involved with it. I liked this new experience, so I decided to share. The first open source software I encountered was firefox, which is an internet browser. I came to know about it a year back. Interestingly, this software made enormous progress and gave a strong fight to popular internet explorer. Well, I got into the habit of firefox and started liking it very much. Firefox can do a lot beyond our imagination, thanks to the extensions and themes , developed by firefox fans.

The other wonderful software by same people (Mozilla Foundation) who developed firefox Mozilla, is thunderbird. It is a email management software with tremendous capabilities. Again, you can do a lot with it, thanks to its extensions and themes. One of the interesting extension is calendar. The mozilla calendar can be used an extension of firefox or thunderbird or alone as sunbird. Anyways, this calendar can be used exteremly easily for group scheduling, where you can post the calendar data file on the web and everybody can access the calendar, all very easily.

The nice thing is that these all are free. The other popular software like IE and MS outlook are good, but we have to buy Microsft Windows and Microsoft Office to be able to use them, and that is where we pay the price.

So, after having nice experiences with these softwares, I plunged into an open source operating system (OS), UBUNTU, which is a linux based OS. Well, the word linux was scary to me, before I actually expereienced UBUNTU. It is a complete OS, which is supported by a nice community. The capabilities of this OS are also tremendous and for free. The nice thing is that I can install softwares to do anything on UBUNTU for no price. Most of them compete well with Windows based softwares. I can contribute to their development also if we want to, as a crtique or developer. I can cutomize my desktop in way I like.

I will talk about individual open source softwares which I use on UBUNTU or Windows in next blogs in the way I use them. I guess it would be ineteresting to plunge in this new world.

By the way, I have nothing against any costly or any other software, and I am penning down just my new experiences here.

Cheers
Anurag

Category: Technology