Posterita's 2nd Article

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Voices from the open source revolution by Alexandre & Frederick Tsang Mang Kin (Posterita)


Last week, we talked about how open source is disrupting the traditional IT industry and how it creates new opportunities. It would be however wrong to assume that the software industry is the only domain affected by the concept of open source. As this culture becomes more and more widely adopted, many different fields of study are being disrupted. Examples are:


FOOD

Open cola: an initiative from volunteers to publish and work on a cola formula that is freely available on the internet Vores: another initiative to create a beer whose formula is also available to the public. Brewtopia: a brewery where the public is invited to participate in the development of the beer recipe. In exchange for their input, shares are given to participants. The shares of that company is also quoted on the stock market of Australia.


EDUCATION

For those who are eager to learn go and visit Open course: The famous university MIT publishes all its course materials (lecture notes, handout, DIVx). Engineering, philosophy, psychology, Mathematics, Sloan School of Management, whatever you are interested in, you name it, you should find it there... (http://ocw.mit.edu).


HEALTH & MEDICINE

Collaboration in the health industry for open source pharmaceutical development Eg: the tropical disease initiative www.tropicaldisease.org Research: — “The Science Commons was created as an alternative to the expensive legal costs of sharing and reusing scientific works in journals”.


CONTENT

Open content: “wikipedia is a multilingual, web based, free content encyclopaedia project. It is written collaboratively by volunteers”, sometimes you can get over 100 people collaborating on a single article, each adding, deleting editing the work previously done by other volunteers. Today it boasts over hundred of thousand of volunteers with over 2 million of articles. That makes it probably the largest encyclopaedia and in our opinion, one of the best resource to find information. www.wikipedia.com


OFFICE SUITE

Openoffice.org is an open source office suite that matches Microsoft Office. Naturally there are features available in one package which is not available on the other one. The main difference is you can get a fully workable solution for your office needs without paying a cent. Try www.openoffice.org and see for yourself which package suits you best.


MEDIA

Weblogs (known also as blogs). “Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries”. Try www.technocrati.com to find blogs. Messageboards. These are places where people sharing similar interest can meet and exchange.


There are many more examples and we cannot agree more with Linus Torvals when he is quoted to say that "The future is open source everything!"


Shaffee