There is no “I” in “Open Source”, but there is one in “Evangelism”

I linger about in copious amounts of tech forums around the net. I tend to be an active member of a selected couple of those forums and whenever someone call out for “the best app for <fill in blank>” I always, but ALWAYS give out something that’s Open Source. If I ever mention anything commercial I state very clearly that there is this other app, that’s free and Open Sourced.

 

In one of these forums someone asked for a Telnet client to access routers. I aptly replied “putty, all the way”, because not only putty is extremely efficient when it comes to simple telnet/ssh connectivity it has some other tricks up it’s sleeve that turn it into an indispensable swiss army-knife that no windows sysadmin should do without. Soon after a few other users replyed “secureCRT“, and I really can’t understand that. the only thing secureCRT does that putty doesn’t is client side scripting (java, VB) which I can understand why a network admin would find that useful (many routers/switches out there are dumb enough not to feature any sort of scripting capabilities on theyr own) but as a system administrator I really can’t find any use for it: Scripts should be local to the computer. sorry.

Now secureCRT also has a price tag, Putty does not. SecureCRT is closed source, Putty is not. SecureCRT accepts kerberus authentication, Putty does not…oh, crap. but hey…it’s free, right? and it does most of the things you want/will need it to do.

 

I evangelize Open Source a bit, and I understand I loose my impartiality in these matters because of it. But we really are dwelling in a culture of no-morals when it comes to software, no one is paying for anything, and everyone is sharing pretty much all they are capable of sharing. Open Source gives us the chance to do it legally and ethically, and still we shy away from such opportunities.

 

Diving into OS X has been a great experience, especially because I discovered that the giant squid of Open Source had reached Apple’s OS as well. I use two commercial apps on my ibook: DevonThink Personal and Office:mac, everything else is Open Source or Freeware (or bundled with OS X, of course). On the other side I was sad do see mozilla so far behind when it came to OS X regarding Firefox and Thunderbird. I eventually gave in to Apple’s mail.app because it’s faster than thunderbird (get a few thousand mails in there and check for yourself) and it’s fully integrated with the OS (Address Book, and such) and 3rd party apps like QuickSilver and Growl. Firefox is “out of character” in OS X, feels sluggish and awkward, Safari is it’s elegant self as always (a gentleman of a browser) and Camino is a young mozilla brat that kicks ass in a serious way.

 

I tend to make a friend each time I notice someone evangelizing like I do. I find this a task as important as the development it self. So if it’s in your heart to support open source but you can’t write a line of code to save your life: spread the word. Belive me: it’s a big enough help.