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Tandem Tribune
Written by Sally |
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| | Open Source
I think we've all seen posts in Newsgroups or E-Groups about someone stealing someone else's page code and putting it on their site; or we've gotten some code and there are long sections telling whose it is, if it can be altered, if you can use it etc. But the best things on the web have come from Open Source.
Open Source means the entire code is publically available. This gives programmers both professional and amateur free reign to modify and improve the code for everyone. For more extensive definitions check here:
Definitions
It is through this mutual goal and sharing that much of the webs best has been developed. The speed at which things are developed and fixed and debugged by many individuals along the way is much faster than traditional closed development; as each person is able to have the entire code to work with. The community spirit, and the desire for people to contribute work for a greater cause, make these programs better than their counterparts. All these programs contain copied code and ideas from previous programs and made them better.
Some of the things that have come from the open source community are, Linux, MySQL database server, Spam Assassin, Mozilla, the Apache web server, which serves the majority of the websites on the internet, and let us not forget ImageMagick, the image manipulation program, to name a few. These are all examples of programs that work MUCH BETTER than commercial programs. The open source community feeds from itself and each revision gets better than the last. There will be code in the future that copies off of these existing, well known programs and they will be even better.
In non-commercial projects, the desire for others to use your page as a template for theirs should be construed as a form of flattery in the open source community. I'm sure you have seen other pages that you really like, and lifted parts of their code as well, to see how they do it? Perhaps on the outside you have changed the appearance, but the idea and portions of code are still from other sources. People working together can achieve more for community development and more knowledge for the greater good.
So in our endeavors, let us encourage collaboration instead of competition. Together we can achieve more for everyone.
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