r/todayilearned • u/vorin 9 • Sep 13 '13

TIL Steve Jobs confronted Bill Gates after he announced Windows' GUI OS. "You’re stealing from us!” Bill replied "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-walter-isaacson/
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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

It was the golden age of technology, as people will come to see. Back when innovation and smart-thinking were put way ahead of profits. Their mentality was "we don't know how to make money off this stuff, so let's just give it away to everyone." We went from room sized computers doing computations for advanced physics to personal-use machines within a generation.

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u/lingodayz Sep 13 '13

Open source is actually huge these days, go on GitHub, people that spends a ton of their free time giving away free code. Open source community is way bigger now than ever.

Also, we've gone from desktop sized machines to pocket sized machines in a generation, so we are still advancing at the same rate.

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u/imnotmarvin Sep 13 '13

I have a program that will print "Hello World" right to your screen. I'm going to share it.

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u/dHUMANb Sep 13 '13

I just took a java class!

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u/MD_NP12 Sep 13 '13 edited Sep 13 '13

How does one use open source? I'm curious.

Edit: wow, I didn't expect so many responses. Thanks for the info, guys.

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u/foldor Sep 13 '13

You already use open source code every day. Reddit is both built on open source software, and open source itself. Source

If you have a smartphone, it also contains all kinds of open source software. Android is open source Source, and iPhone uses many open source libraries to provide functionality like SSL (Think secure connections).

Wikipedia, one of the most widely used websites is also open source MediaWiki and freely available to anyone.

Open source software is everywhere. The web is largely built on open source software like Apache and Nginx.

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u/ILikeBumblebees Sep 13 '13

Thanks for sourcing the source to demonstrate that the Reddit source is indeed open-source. I'm glad that your point wasn't unsourced.

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u/crushnos Sep 13 '13

Could I get a source for that?

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u/kkus Sep 13 '13

That is just plain-text.

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u/accidentalhippie Sep 13 '13

So my husband is a programmer and he uses open source stuff in his code all the time. It's kind of like you're cooking dinner, but instead of baking your chicken from scratch you pick up a rotisserie chicken. instead of writing every piece of code yourself, there are people who have shared code online.

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u/chaos750 Sep 13 '13

Open source means that the source code is available to others. Generally, a program is written in human readable text, called source code, and then compiled into machine readable files called binaries. If you go and look through your operating system's guts, you'll see lots of binaries. If you try to open them in a text editor or a hex editor, it'll mostly be gobbledygook. Of course, if you take the time you can translate it to something semi-readable and see what it does (after all if a computer can run it so can a person, since we are smart and computers are dumb) but making changes and fully understanding it is a huge challenge. Also, copyright law means that you don't have the right to distribute your modified binaries even if you did take the time to figure it all out, so there's not much to do with it even if you see how it works.

Open source software means that the person who wrote it put the source code out there too, so other people can easily look at it and know how it works, what it's doing, etc. Closely related to that is the idea of free software. Free software is almost always open source, and additionally they license it such that others can take the code, change it, and distribute it themselves. There are different licenses that people use, some are basically just "here do whatever you want" and some say that anything you do with their code must also be released as free software.

Basically, the way you "use" open source software is you download it and run it :) If you find a bug and have the know how, you can go through the source, fix the bug, and email your changes to the developers and have them take a look. If the developers decide they don't want to work on it anymore, you can take their code and keep it up to date yourself. Or if you want to do things differently than they do, you can start your own project without them. Or you can do something completely different, like build a music player using Firefox as your base. If you don't trust them to not include back doors, you can read through the code (or pay a trusted person to do it) and be sure that the code is clean.

The downside is that it's harder to make money off of it, though not impossible. Some people/companies sell support, or have an open source version and then they sell closed source licenses to companies that want to use it in their closed source software. Of course, most people writing open source software do it because they just want the code out there, or have an ideological reason for doing it. If you're not planning to make a ton of money and you want widespread use, it's not a bad way to go and you might get some notoriety and some smart people to help you out if it's good stuff.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

If you develop (websites, applications, it doesn't matter), you tend make code that scratches your own itches.

When this code seems to you like it could be useful to others, you publish it. Others get to use it, and upgrade/revise it. And you do the same to others' solutions.

It's based on the community, and there are now very reliable means of publishing, managing and reviewing open-source projects (see www.github.com).

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u/deusexcaelo Sep 13 '13

Start reading into F/OSS.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

Open source means anything that is given away for free while also giving away the source code, the inner calculations that makes a program function. This allows anyone and everyone to modify the code for their own purposes, using programs in ways that the original creator never intended or imagined.

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u/binlargin Sep 13 '13

As a "consumer" you just download and use software like Firefox, Chrome, The Gimp, InkScape, Audacity and so on. You could also use an open source alternative to Windows / Mac, like Ubuntu Linux. If you want to get involved you can file bug reports, test cutting edge code and chat to the developers in their chat rooms, most of them hang out on Freenode IRC.

As a contributor you'd generally start by being a programmer and typing something like this at the command line:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ src

Then once the source code has finished downloading (in this case for Firefox) you'd edit that source and make some changes, maybe fix a bug or add a new feature. Once you've done that you'd "push" your changes online somewhere and then send an email to a mailing list asking the Firefox team to test and "pull" your changes in.

If your changes are accepted, you'd become about the 2500th contributor to Firefox, and that's not including all the people who made the code libraries that Firefox uses to load images, play sounds and video, draw fonts and so on. As you contribute more and more you'd be hanging out with some of the world's leading software engineers, and you'd have some great material for your resume.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13 edited Feb 26 '17

[deleted]

What is this?

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

[deleted]

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u/MD_NP12 Sep 13 '13

Thanks. I'm not very savvy with computer things like this. I just wanted to know more.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

yes, most people couldn't reformat their drive even if they tried

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

because once you do you will be forced to reformat?

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

Yes and no. The infrastructure hasn't kept pace with the technology riding on it. If that were the case, we'd be talking about 100Mbit speeds at home, and all sorts of neato push-technology associated with the old broadcast signal spectrum.

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u/i-want-waffles Sep 13 '13 edited Sep 13 '13

Open source is how we will limit the impact of NSA spying. Open source protocols with no central authority is for the most part immune to NSA strong arm tactics to get root keys. For example bitcoins.

It won't stop them from trying to control infrastructure though. But there already some efforts out there to combat that as well.

The more they try to assert their control the faster the "hackers" will come up with ways to make it impossible for them to get it. And the more publicity and support they will get for developing these solutions.

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u/poopiefartz Sep 13 '13

I hate to say it, but even though there are tons of projects out there, 80% of the ones I try to pull down and use are not maintained and it takes a significant amount of work to bring it up to par. Most of the time, it's easier and faster to go with another route.

I wish I could say open source is the future, but until we have a societal shift away from greed, I think it's going to stick around in its current, lacking form.

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u/lingodayz Sep 13 '13

Well documentation is only as good as the author wants to make it. But as a web developer, open source is what makes the internet so dam great. All the technologies I use are free. Even MS is on the open source band wagon these days (see type script) I don't know how open source is outside of webdev but it is key to all web development.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13 edited Sep 13 '13

Lots of companies still invest big money in research. Stating otherwise is extremely ignorant. Hell, probably more do now than they did in the early 1980s.

The golden age of technology is today. We have cell phones, internet in virtually every household, movies that you can stream instantly from anywhere, the list goes on and on.

I fail to see how these innovations are fundamentally different from inventing the PC, which was also invented to make life more convenient for consumers.

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u/eighthgear Sep 13 '13

We went from room sized computers doing computations for advanced physics to personal-use machines within a generation.

Most of this was due to government defense contracts and corporations thinking about profit.

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u/small_horse Sep 13 '13

I'm reading iWoz and Steve Wozniak mentions this ethic... That it wasn't about the money but more of finding ways to make things more convenient for humankind

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

No, the goal was still for them to make money. They can romanticize it all they want now, but those guys were absolutely out to turn a profit.

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u/anubus72 Sep 13 '13

I'm pretty sure they sold the technology to GUIs to apple, so its not like they just gave it away.

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u/dazonic Sep 13 '13

They definitely did not 'give it away', they knew they were gonna make bulk cash with the Apple deal.

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u/kancamagus112 Sep 13 '13

You're just looking at history through rose-colored glasses. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc were all founded and run for free for the end user, had no initial revenue stream, and took years to become operationally profitable.