Learning about FOSS!

I think I'll divide this post up into two sections.   The first to address my thoughts about the first chapter in the book, and the second on my experience installing some open source software.

Book
First of all, this book is a pretty good read.  After getting though a little history behind FOSS and some basics regarding software development practices, the book starts getting into some things that I either had no prior knowledge of or was misinformed about.

I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but I did actually think that the "free" in FOSS meant that it didn't cost anything.  So the thing that I learned today is that it refers to the concept of free speech.  This means that when it is licensed, which I'll get back to in a minute, free software is actually legally protected.  This was a new idea to me; the fact that free software even required any protecting.

I'll admit this straight off, when I got to the section about licensing I was tempted to either skip ahead or skim.  But I soldiered through it and was amazed by some of the information in this section.  To quickly sum it up, FOSS needs licenses (GPL is one) to keep the big dogs from stealing the software and placing it under their own proprietary licenses.  One thing I wish the authors would have explored further (maybe in a later chapter) is how are these licenses protected.  And this leads right what kind of impact FOSS has had on the world so far.

All you need to know about the worldwide impact of FOSS is this figure: $60 billion.  That is the amount of lost revenue to software companies because of FOSS per year.   It makes me a little nervous to attend the POSSCON conference in March, because I'll be half-expecting a hit squad from some development company to show up.
And that's it, I hope the rest of the book is as informative as this chapter was.

Installing FOSS
This will be short and sweet, as I encountered no problems intalling GIMP, a really cool photo editer, on either of the platforms that I run.  On Windows, I simply downloaded the setup executable and ran it.  Then walked through the steps using the Windows Installer.  Intalling on Ubuntu was even simpler.  I just ran three sudo apt-get commands in the terminal, and it was all gravy.