Open Source Movement
As Communication students and scholars, we have important duties in our line of work. One of our duties is to keep up to date with new and up coming technology. It depends on what field of com you may be going into, but each one should know about open source software.
This is such a huge, controversial topic because these people could be undermining the billionaires of the world. People are saying there will be no support for these free programs, but I say who cares? I have never needed support to run my computers, my dad has 40 employees each with a computer and they don’t need "support." Like Stallman said, there are people out there who just need their hand held because it’s the easy way out. I have a solution for these people with GNU. Because they are giving this away for free and will give no support, why not just give a great instruction manual and go around on a couple tours giving extensive knowledge to tech guys. Now, those tech guys know a lot about the program and they can either run a business of their own, or get hired as the "tech guy" for any business. In the long run, people and businesses will save money by doing this.
As communication scholars, sometimes it is our job to come up with answers, advertisements, and public relation kinds of things. That is why we should be reading into these things right now and learning about this movement. Someday soon it will be us backing up these guys who are trying to get a free product out there in the open. It could be our volunteer time doing this stuff for them or it could be paid, who knows. We also need to know about current technology because our jobs will rely heavily on knowledge and capability.
Just to touch on the subject of these programmers not getting paid- I didn’t hear of anyone shoving knives in these guys’ faces forcing them to become programmers for GNU. They are doing this because they truly believe in it and want to help and give their input. I think it is so ridiculous that outsiders are trying to speak for these programmers. Obviously they wouldn’t be doing it if they really didn’t want to be.
Discussion Questions:
1. Why are these outsiders trying to speak for the programmers about the lack of money?
2. Do you think this kind of thing will really get out there? It is so controversial and the competitors are billionaires who could beat them out of anything...
3. As Communication students, what do you think about the technology that is out there now and the upcoming?
This is such a huge, controversial topic because these people could be undermining the billionaires of the world. People are saying there will be no support for these free programs, but I say who cares? I have never needed support to run my computers, my dad has 40 employees each with a computer and they don’t need "support." Like Stallman said, there are people out there who just need their hand held because it’s the easy way out. I have a solution for these people with GNU. Because they are giving this away for free and will give no support, why not just give a great instruction manual and go around on a couple tours giving extensive knowledge to tech guys. Now, those tech guys know a lot about the program and they can either run a business of their own, or get hired as the "tech guy" for any business. In the long run, people and businesses will save money by doing this.
As communication scholars, sometimes it is our job to come up with answers, advertisements, and public relation kinds of things. That is why we should be reading into these things right now and learning about this movement. Someday soon it will be us backing up these guys who are trying to get a free product out there in the open. It could be our volunteer time doing this stuff for them or it could be paid, who knows. We also need to know about current technology because our jobs will rely heavily on knowledge and capability.
Just to touch on the subject of these programmers not getting paid- I didn’t hear of anyone shoving knives in these guys’ faces forcing them to become programmers for GNU. They are doing this because they truly believe in it and want to help and give their input. I think it is so ridiculous that outsiders are trying to speak for these programmers. Obviously they wouldn’t be doing it if they really didn’t want to be.
Discussion Questions:
1. Why are these outsiders trying to speak for the programmers about the lack of money?
2. Do you think this kind of thing will really get out there? It is so controversial and the competitors are billionaires who could beat them out of anything...
3. As Communication students, what do you think about the technology that is out there now and the upcoming?
posted by J Couden's Blog @ 10:21 AM
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