Open Source vs. Money

    In today's economy, most people are focused purely on making money. The reason behind making has been, for the most part, lost on most fronts. When asked what the top goal for their life was, many people claimed it was to get rich. People are encouraged to go to college purely so that they can get a good job that pays them a lot of money, they are told that in order to do anything they want, they need money, they are told to follow the money first, and then form goals based on the amount of money they obtain. This is counter-intuitive to everything one can find when one looks at the major innovations, inventions, and general success throughout history.

    In technology, many of the great innovators and inventors got a job that secured them financially, but the main reason for taking those particular jobs was not money, but the amount of time the job gave them. They used the job to keep themselves fed, but focused on their projects. Most of them never got rich off their work, many were not recognized in their time, and often they died poor. However, these people contributed more to science and technology than many laboratories have all around the world. Without these innovators, most of today's technology would not be around. They spearheaded the technological revolutions with their ideas and work, not to get rich, but because they wanted to see it happen.

    This is where open-source software comes in. The people who develop these programs are not doing so to get rich, but because they want to see their ideas happen, they want people to use their ideas, and most importantly, they want to contribute to the general improvement of software. The purpose of open-source and the ideal which it follows is not to let people steal eachother's work, but to improve upon previous designs. Asking for donations or money to help support a project is perfectly fine and is even necessary sometimes and people need money to pay for food and other living expensives, but the point of this money is that it is to help support the project; as in, getting money is not the goal of the project.

    However, there is very little being done to promote these outside of the open-source communities. Very often, people are steered away from open-source by proprietary propoganda or by other people who had bad experiences. In addition, when a new user enters the open arena, they are often overwhelmed and don't understand what is going on. Most who come and stay know computers very well, so they know what they are doing. This is not going to benefit everyone, though. Open-source needs to also be able to draw in regular users. Many people, if not most, know of Firefox, the major open-source web browser, but this is an unfortunately rare example of an open-source program that is easy to learn and adjust to and that is well known. Many who are proficient with computers are even scared of going all the way to Linux because they have heard horror stories of how hard it is and do not think they have some form help available.

    In the end, open-source projects need to be able to draw in even inexperienced users in the stable versions of their programs. There needs to be some form of promotion amoung the open-source community that can also reach out to people. The campaign for Firefox resulted in many user-created things like commercials and designs that resulted in a good amount of the population knowing about this new web browser. This sort of thing is a bit too extensive to do for every open-source application that is able to reach out to most of the population, but there are alternatives that need to be looked into that could promote these. For example, some colleges with Computer Science departments put together lists of open-source programs that are good alternatives to commonly used applications and send them out to students. This is good, but will only reach college students, and can be considered spam mail by many. 

    In the end, open-source communities need to find a way to spread the word that will not infringe on people (like spam) but will still reach many. Creating websites and blogs help, but they need to find effective ways to promote themselves and others. The ideal of working with a goal and not for money is something that needs to be noticed, people need to know this ideal is still alive and working. This ideal applies not just for technology and software, but to almost every field. The music and arts, mathematics, social sciences, ect. all can benefit from this ideal.