I have always been interested in computers, and would find myself hanging out with the Computer Science students instead of the Aviation Management or Business Management students I was a part of. At home and at work I have been largely self-teaching myself using computers starting with Excel and Access with VBA through ASP and SQL at work. Thankfully my current employer values education, and so I have been taking classes and not only learning the technology, but un-learning what I have been doing wrong over the years. At home, though, I have been teaching myself Linux, system administration, networking and the overall method of migrating our system from Windows to Linux. I am involved in the Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS.org) I have the opportunity to take what I've learned the hard way and hopefully help others.. I have been enjoying Open Source for a while now, and I am hoping to get a better understanding of the entire model and application.
Authored Comments
With business headlines not giving warm fuzzies, it's nice to see some companies doing good.
I remember hearing about Red Hat donating it's party funds to charity (wow.. 2008?! I didn't think it was THAT long ago!). This is a great example of the more underlying philosophy of open source developers and users, about collaborating. In this case collaborating is with the assisting organizations, and focusing on helping out others instead of themselves.
I think this shows Red Hat as more than just a company making revenue, or software developers making great open source products. It is a company of people.
It actually isn't a surprise the way Android and Microsoft have gone in the past few years.
In the earlier days, Microsoft marketed Windows CE and it was fairly poplular. Unfortunately for them, they sat on it like they did Internet Explorer and Windows until competition came around.
When competitiion did show up (Firefox for IE, Linux and Apple for Windows) they've had to fire up the forges and restart their engines. Windows CE is just the last one to get their engines roaring and only time will tell if they shifted it into the right gear with Windows 7 Phone.
Android provided an alternative to the "lust-inducing" iPhone which was not [1] tied to AT&T, [2] not tied to Apple hardware and [3] competitively priced.
In both of these cases, open source provided the means for competition to arise, but being open source is not what sold these products/ideas.