Open Sourcery

This may sound weird, but give it a shot. It’s another example of how open source software can improve your life, indirectly… Let me explain.

What’s GMail?

Visit http://gmail.google.com for more accurate information as things tend to change quite frequently with GMail. In a nutshell it’s Google’s own attempt at offering a web-based mailbox, with a 1000MB of storage (yes, a 1000MB). It’s almost impossible to grasp how many plain-text e-mails can be neatly archived in your GMail account. Bonus, you can use Google’s powerful search tools to get the messages you want quickly and effectively.

What’s Mailman?

OK, a fair question needs a fair answer. According to the Mailman website, “Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists.” I hear people saying that they don’t want to run a mailing list, you don’t need to. The magic is that most mailing lists for open source projects run Mailman. Now, as an open source user you want to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible since they’re always up to date and contain a lot of useful information.

The downside? Imagine opening your mailbox in the morning having 200 or more additonal unread e-mails waiting for your keen eye. Use a GMail account and subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, setup some filters and have the messages labeled and archived in an instant. You never see these mesages until you need to, and with 1000MB of storage you don’t need to worry.

You can now conveniently search through your e-mails looking for answers that might not even be on the web yet, or they are but the Googlebot hasn’t tracked them down yet.

What’s so open?



Mailman is mainly coded in a technology called Python, which is open source just like Mailman. The fact that both technologies are open source allows server admins to quickly and freely (except for bandwidth) setup big communities of users that can collaborate to make open source software itself, a big success. And don’t worry about Python, Google themselves use it for some of their services…

Conclusions

Access the new internet using Google’s GMail service and Mailman-powered mailing lists. Personally I’m subscribed to the following OSS mailing lists:

• Fedora Users
• Fedora Marketing
• Netfilter
• MySQL Users
• Apache httpd Users
• LARTC (Linux Advance Routing and Traffic Control)
• Gauteng Linux Users Group

Visit the websites above to explore the new internet using your GMail account!

“OSS; where did it start and where is it going?” This is one of IT’s biggest and longest debates. Corporates fear and love it at the same time, home users don’t know and the majority of it’s users like it because it’s ‘free’.

What is OSS, or Open Source, and what does it mean to us? The answer to this one might just land you an honourary doctorate, or on a hitlist of some giant software company. But one thing is for sure, open source is a major driving factor in the future of ICT and all of us need to educate ourselfs in its ways and workings.

One of the biggest pillars of Open Source is the collaborative effort that goes into making the software. In an ideal world every user of open source should contribute in some way, to help the projects. Open source does not always have corporate budgets and cannot fully compete with proprietory software on all fields. This is my contribution to the software and their projects, an effort to educate and enrich those willing to learn what the revolution is all about.

Join me as we explore both parts of the coin, light and dark, to see where we can fit open source into our modern technology driven society. I’m exploring everything from lowering TCO to just doing cool stuff. Everythings out there, let’s make use of it and change the way we use technology in our everyday lives…

In closing, WikiPedia defines Open Source as follows:

Under the Open Source Definition, licenses must meet ten conditions in order to be considered open source licenses:

1. Free Redistribution: the software can be freely given away or sold.
2. Source Code: the source code must either be included or freely obtainable.
3. Derived Works: redistribution of modifications must be allowed.
4. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code: licenses may require that modifications are redistributed only as patches.
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: no-one can be locked out.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: commercial users cannot be excluded.
7. Distribution of License: The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product: the program cannot be licensed only as part of a larger distribution.
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software: the license cannot insist that any other software it is distributed with must also be open source.
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral: no click-wrap licenses or other medium-specific ways of accepting the license must be required.

For more information visit these pages

• WikiPedia – Open Source
• Open Source Initiative OSI – The Open Source Definition
• RedHat – Why Open Source?