OpenSource :: Article - 2eNetWorX

About Open Source

by Hakan Eskici

Introduction

World is full of problems waiting to be solved. But it takes lots of effort; solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Nobody should ever have to solve a problem twice.

This is why the hackers use Internet to communicate, to discuss, to solve and to share.

About Hackers

Hacker is a person who has the technical ability in solving problems and overcoming limits.

Hacker is not a software-hacker, which is actuall called cracker; hackers build things, crackers break them.

And you are not a hacker until someone else call you hacker.

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards. The members of this culture originated the term "hacker". Hackers built the Internet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work.

"If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker."

About OpenSource

What is OpenSource?

"The basic idea behind open source is very simple. When programmers on the Internet can read, redistribute, and modify the source for a piece of software, it evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

We in the open-source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits."

It's time to contribute!

Why OpenSource software?

The projects listed on this site are OpenSource. They were OpenSource. They evolved. Many developers contributed to them, and many are still willing to. Get your place in the OpenSource development world now. Let the others call you hacker.

More readings on OpenSource

The Open Source Definition
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Homesteading the Noosphere
The Magic Cauldron
A Brief History of Hackerdom

Parts adopted and derived from sources listed in OpenSource.org