Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Pelett. I'm an editor here at how Stuff Works, and I've got writer Jonathan Strickland with me today. Hey there, we're calling this one the wide Open Podcast. Awesome. You gotta love open especially when you're talking about open source software, which is what we were going to discuss, um based. Basically, what happened was, after the release of Gutsy Gibbon, which is a new version of the open source Ubuntu operating system. I decided to download it, burn it on a CD and put it in my, uh my father's old PC that he gave me when he got a new one, and um, you know, actually I brought it up with him. I said, I'm gonna, you know, try this out on your old machine. You know, it's not gonna be using Windows and you know, that's just another thing that people aren't going to use. And he was saying, what's the big deal? Why should I care about open source? And I really didn't have I clean cut good podcast, Double answer for im at the time. Well, I'm glad you came into the room today because I've got one for you. Actually, Uh, well we'll talk it. First of all, what open source really means, um. Open source is a way of developing software in which the the original developer, whoever first programs the the application, uh, makes all of the source code available to anyone and everyone who wants to look at it and not just look at it, but copy it, modify it, build on it, alter it in any way they like, as long as they're also following the rules set by the Open Source Initiative, which is a group that kind of oversees the standards that are used for open source software. And the idea here is that through a community of developers, a program can evolve much faster in a much more fluid environment, uh than it would in a clothe environment. And by closed environment, we're talking about companies that have proprietary software where only their developers work on the program. We're looking at you Microsoft and Apple. Yes, particularly yes, particularly those two, especially Apple, because you know, since they build their own machines, they they're operating system takes advantage of those specific uh pieces of the computer like the processor, and the video card and the the audio card that specifically operates, which is one of those things that makes Apple computer. Why you know, people say that Apple computers just works because they always have, you know, a certain subset of of materials that're going to make the machines up right. It's not like a PC that could come from one or one manufacturer versus one thousand other manufacturers. Um, it's software that is specifically designed to work on a specific machine and so hey, what do you know? It works. But the problem is they don't share that with everybody, so no one else can really tweak anything or build anything specifically off of that software you have. It's it's much more difficult to develop software for a platform like that, and then you have, you know, bugs that come up and you have to wait for them the manufacturer to do that, rather than you know, the open source group can go ahead and get to work on it, and somebody can, you know, over their lunch break from their day job, can maybe work out a bug that has been bugging the users of that software. That's actually kind of an extension of the old hacker culture, where hackers would look at a program and say, you know, this thing is just not doing what I think it should do, not necessarily what it was designed to do, but whatever the hacker thought this program was supposed to do. And then the hacker would go hack out some code. That's where the name came from, and uh, you know, by hooker by crook, that program was going to do what the hacker wanted it to do. And the same sort of thing with open source software. If you were to download a certain application that was open source and you were to use it, and you're saying, you know, this could really use such and such. There's this one feature that I really wish this had. Well, if you had the skills and the knowledge, you could program that feature and insert it into the application and make it available to everyone, and now, voila, we've got a new version of this software that something has a new feature, and we didn't have to wait three years for the next cycle of releases to come around. That's true. Yeah. An example that you may already be using UM is when when Netscape was bought by a o L, they released their source code for the Netscape browser as open source, and it is resulted in the Thunderbird email client, the Firefox browser, and somebody released the Flock browser, which incorporates uh, the ability to network your social network stuff into the browser. So you actually have a sidebar where you can check the Flicker the latest feed from Flicker or Twitter or Facebook or whatever, you know, several different accounts, and they actually just added some new ones. So they saw a need for that and just went ahead and upgraded the browser the way they thought it should be done. If you'd like to learn more about open source, we have an article called what does open source mean? We also, if you are interested in the hacker culture, Johnathan wrote an article about how hackers work, and both of those are available on how stuff works dot com. Thanks for listening. For moral on this and thousands of other topics. Is how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcasts at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you

Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Pelett. I'm an editor here at how Stuff Works, and I've got writer Jonathan Strickland with me today. Hey there, we're calling this one the wide Open Podcast. Awesome. You gotta love open especially when you're talking about open source software, which is what we were going to discuss, um based. Basically, what happened was, after the release of Gutsy Gibbon, which is a new version of the open source Ubuntu operating system. I decided to download it, burn it on a CD and put it in my, uh my father's old PC that he gave me when he got a new one, and um, you know, actually I brought it up with him. I said, I'm gonna, you know, try this out on your old machine. You know, it's not gonna be using Windows and you know, that's just another thing that people aren't going to use. And he was saying, what's the big deal? Why should I care about open source? And I really didn't have I clean cut good podcast, Double answer for im at the time. Well, I'm glad you came into the room today because I've got one for you. Actually, Uh, well we'll talk it. First of all, what open source really means, um. Open source is a way of developing software in which the the original developer, whoever first programs the the application, uh, makes all of the source code available to anyone and everyone who wants to look at it and not just look at it, but copy it, modify it, build on it, alter it in any way they like, as long as they're also following the rules set by the Open Source Initiative, which is a group that kind of oversees the standards that are used for open source software. And the idea here is that through a community of developers, a program can evolve much faster in a much more fluid environment, uh than it would in a clothe environment. And by closed environment, we're talking about companies that have proprietary software where only their developers work on the program. We're looking at you Microsoft and Apple. Yes, particularly yes, particularly those two, especially Apple, because you know, since they build their own machines, they they're operating system takes advantage of those specific uh pieces of the computer like the processor, and the video card and the the audio card that specifically operates, which is one of those things that makes Apple computer. Why you know, people say that Apple computers just works because they always have, you know, a certain subset of of materials that're going to make the machines up right. It's not like a PC that could come from one or one manufacturer versus one thousand other manufacturers. Um, it's software that is specifically designed to work on a specific machine and so hey, what do you know? It works. But the problem is they don't share that with everybody, so no one else can really tweak anything or build anything specifically off of that software you have. It's it's much more difficult to develop software for a platform like that, and then you have, you know, bugs that come up and you have to wait for them the manufacturer to do that, rather than you know, the open source group can go ahead and get to work on it, and somebody can, you know, over their lunch break from their day job, can maybe work out a bug that has been bugging the users of that software. That's actually kind of an extension of the old hacker culture, where hackers would look at a program and say, you know, this thing is just not doing what I think it should do, not necessarily what it was designed to do, but whatever the hacker thought this program was supposed to do. And then the hacker would go hack out some code. That's where the name came from, and uh, you know, by hooker by crook, that program was going to do what the hacker wanted it to do. And the same sort of thing with open source software. If you were to download a certain application that was open source and you were to use it, and you're saying, you know, this could really use such and such. There's this one feature that I really wish this had. Well, if you had the skills and the knowledge, you could program that feature and insert it into the application and make it available to everyone, and now, voila, we've got a new version of this software that something has a new feature, and we didn't have to wait three years for the next cycle of releases to come around. That's true. Yeah. An example that you may already be using UM is when when Netscape was bought by a o L, they released their source code for the Netscape browser as open source, and it is resulted in the Thunderbird email client, the Firefox browser, and somebody released the Flock browser, which incorporates uh, the ability to network your social network stuff into the browser. So you actually have a sidebar where you can check the Flicker the latest feed from Flicker or Twitter or Facebook or whatever, you know, several different accounts, and they actually just added some new ones. So they saw a need for that and just went ahead and upgraded the browser the way they thought it should be done. If you'd like to learn more about open source, we have an article called what does open source mean? We also, if you are interested in the hacker culture, Johnathan wrote an article about how hackers work, and both of those are available on how stuff works dot com. Thanks for listening. For moral on this and thousands of other topics. Is how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcasts at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you