19-appendix-floss.md 3.8 KB
FLOSS
Free/Libre and Open Source Software, in short, FLOSS is based on the concept of a community, which itself is based on the concept of sharing, and particularly the sharing of knowledge. FLOSS are free for usage, modification and redistribution.
If you have already read this book, then you are already familiar with FLOSS since you have been using Python all along and Python is an open source software!
Here are some examples of FLOSS to give an idea of the kind of things that community sharing and building can create:
: This is a FLOSS OS kernel used in the GNU/Linux operating
system. Linux, the kernel, was started by Linus Torvalds as a
student. Android is based on Linux. Any website you use these days
will mostly be running on Linux.
: This is a community-driven distribution, sponsored by Canonical
and it is the most popular Linux distribution today. It allows you
to install a plethora of FLOSS available and all this in an
easy-to-use and easy-to-install manner. Best of all, you can just
reboot your computer and run GNU/Linux off the CD! This allows you
to completely try out the new OS before installing it on your
computer. However, Ubuntu is not entirely free software; it
contains proprietary drivers, firmware, and applications.
: This is an excellent community-driven and developed office suite
with a writer, presentation, spreadsheet and drawing components
among other things. It can even open and edit MS Word and MS
PowerPoint files with ease. It runs on almost all platforms and is
entirely free, libre and open source software.
: This is the best web browser. It is blazingly fast and has
gained critical acclaim for its sensible and impressive
features. The extensions concept allows any kind of plugins to be
used.
Its companion product
[Thunderbird](http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird) is an
excellent email client that makes reading email a snap.
: This is an open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET
platform. It allows .NET applications to be created and run on
GNU/Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Mac OS and many other platforms as
well.
: This is the popular open source web server. In fact, it is the
most popular web server on the planet! It runs nearly more than
half of the websites out there. Yes, that's right - Apache handles
more websites than all the competition (including Microsoft IIS)
combined.
: This is a video player that can play anything from DivX to MP3 to
Ogg to VCDs and DVDs to ... who says open source ain't fun? ;-)
This list is just intended to give you a brief idea - there are many more excellent FLOSS out there, such as the Perl language, PHP language, Drupal content management system for websites, PostgreSQL database server, TORCS racing game, KDevelop IDE, Xine - the movie player, VIM editor, Quanta+ editor, Banshee audio player, GIMP image editing program, ... This list could go on forever.
To get the latest buzz in the FLOSS world, check out the following websites:
Visit the following websites for more information on FLOSS:
So, go ahead and explore the vast, free and open world of FLOSS!