Thank You Open Source

I got up early to help my mother cook Thanksgiving dinner. By help of course, I mean that mostly I just observed. Afterwards we mindlessly watched the Macy’s Day Parade for a while until the stream of performers were hard to distinguish from one another. Bad pop singers and runner-up American Idol contestants does not make a good show in my opinion.

I then began to wonder about what I was really thankful for this Thanksgiving Day. A cliché, yes, but one of the few I actually enjoy. Besides the obvious friends and family, besides my good health, wonderful clients and business partners, what was I thankful for? What popped into my mind first was another group of people, another community that had over the last year made my business so much better, and consequently my client’s websites so much more successful. The Open Source Community.

What most people don’t realize about computers and the Internet in particular is that Open Source software runs a huge amount of things we don’t even think about. The Internet is mostly powered by computers running Linux. Linux is an Open Source operating system that powers more than half of the servers in the world. Linux is also used in a huge array of other devices such as the TiVo television recorder, and cell phones such as the G1.

Apache is the most popular web server software, it is also Open Source. As of November 2008 Apache served 50.34% of all websites. One out of every two websites you visit relies solely on this community project to work.

PHP is an Open Source scripting language ideal for producing dynamic web pages. PHP is the language that both of my content management systems, Wordpress and Drupal are built with. PHP is currently used on more than 20 million websites, and again this language is completely open and available for use by anyone. It is developed by the community and supported by their efforts.

The final large Open Source project is MySQL. MySQL is an Open Source Database system. MySQL can be used in a huge host of applications but is most famous as the backbone to almost 10 million websites. Some web sites that use MySQL for their data storage and logging of user data include Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube.

Together these four big projects provide a huge foundation for Web Development.

I also use two Open Source content management systems for my websites. Wordpress and Drupal. Wordpress is the preeminent open source blogging platform and for most websites this platform is simple to use, powerful, and efficient. Drupal is a more complicated content-management framework, and for more complicated sites it makes it easy to plug and play. To learn more about content management systems and what their purpose is please see my earlier posts on the subject.

These massive projects are not centrally controlled. They usually started off as solo projects but then became so big and so popular that the entire community is needed to make them work. The Open Source community builds them and they are freely available for others to use, modify, fork, play with, or contribute back to the project.

I belong to a business networking group called BNI. The core philosophy of BNI is giver’s gain, the more you contribute to others the more they will contribute to you. Open Source Software of any strain is the epitome of this principle. You can use the software freely and the software is so good and so important that you can’t help but want to contribute back to the community that has helped you.

So that’s what I’m thankful for this year. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to making these products successful. Thank you for making it so much easier to design and manage websites. Thank you for making the world a more open place.

I have a number of projects I am working on and hope to release to the community in January 2009. I look forward to your feedback.