Open Source: Denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed with or without modification. (definition by Dictionary.com).
In today’s world, time is money, thus the less time you you use to complete a task the more benificial it is (relative to its quality). Open Source software has become a stepping stone for learning in many institutions to help educate the youth in programming related feilds. In our innovation management class, the rate at which we could become proficiency with HTML, CSS, javascript and JQuery library has been exponentially expeediated by the use of open source software, where we can take other programmers code, examine it, change it, and learn from hands on experiance what different aspects of the code do.
What i think is being used in many programming classes but what should be used even more is Open Source software. Now not saying that it should be exclusively taught in that manner, but once introduced to the syntax of a language, students should be given code to examine and see how the syntax is applied and what exactly happens once the rules are applied. Another Example where Open Source software has been extreamly benificial to education is operating systems. In the University of Cape Town, their entire computer science department runs off open source operating systems, where all their servers are linux based, this enables students to have access to powerful tools without having to pay the hefty price of today’s software licences.
Back to this class, when ever there is a problem or question that we need answered about the programming section of the class, all we have to do is find existing code that does what we want it to do, examine it, find the issue in our code, and carry on, this hands on learning experience of finding things out for ourselves is way more timely and helps in long term memory retention of the material.
Interesting topic! I always fascinated with the idea of using Open source softwares and Operating Systems. A great advantage of using open source softwares is that an organization can save a lot by using open source programs. For example at Westminster the current platform that the college use for educational purpose (“Moodle”) is an open source platform, by doing this Westminster is saving money because they do not longer need to pay the high fees for using a pay educational platform.
In my opinion, open source resources (be they software, operating systems, and/or code and things of the like) are the true testament to a free market place of ideas. In essence, if people are willing to share their ideas, concepts and work and are also willing to openly display them for the benefit of the general populace, then people should also be willing to credit them for the advancement of their ideas. However, sharing without credit is stealing. There is a happy medium. To succeed in today’s world, we must be willing to accept help and give credit where credit is due. Such is the beauty of open source resourcing.
one of the more important things stated in this post, and something that is very important to many business is the fact that time is money. in an exponentially growing technological world, programmers using open-source have an added advantage than many others in their field. as i see it, they are in essence all working toward the same common goal of improving technology to the best of their ability and in the fastest/most efficient means possible. the “payment ” for these individual designers is the fact that the project they started alone only after being exposed to other participants in their field, could possibly be expanded or even completed. i feel like other business should use tactics such as these to promote open innovation along their specific channel.