One of the biggest obstacles to achieving universal ICT access is the digital divide, both between and within countries.
There is a gap between the information haves and have-nots, or knows and know-nots. For example, at one stage there were more Internet hosts in Manhattan than the whole of Africa. Rather than shrinking, this gap is continually growing.
Part of the digital divide in South Africa involves gender and those most likely to benefit from ICTs are rich, educated young men in urban areas. Illiteracy is another part of the digital divide and it is higher amongst females than males as most females are confined to rural areas, participating in subsistence agriculture.
You’re probably wondering what this is and what it means and how it is relevant to you.
Let me start with how it is relevant to you. If you’re a member on Twitter (and I’m talking about an active member – not a ‘lurker’), you are probably gathering a small following depending on how often you tweet and what it is that you tweet.
Ok, say you’re a movie buff (like me). Have you ever considered producing a piece? Or writing a simple plot? If you have, I have found the perfect open source website where you can accomplish your dreams.
Open Source Cinema is a virtual space where you can upload your own videos, or remix other user’s content to create something entirely new. You can use media from your own archives, or snatch a YouTube vid and start creating your masterpiece.
Things have changed over the past two months in which I haven’t posted any blogs. It is an exciting time: I found out I am to enter the working world next year, I produced and edited material I never would have dreamt of doing 12 months ago, the watertank in our residence burst (wasn’t too overly joyed about that), and I became the proud new owner of a BlackBerry.
Google is taking over the world one application at a time. What you might not know, is how significant their contribution is to open source.
Google has released well over 15 million lines of code and over 500 projects. Click here to see for yourself. This makes them the largest open source-based company on the planet.
The world we live in has massive insecurities. We want what we don’t have and when we get what we want, there is a better version already out. It’s a win – lose situation. A win, for the companies spawning these new ideas, and a loss for us, the eager, naive and gullible consumer.
People are living in a state of mind where – well, Freddie Mercury said it best – “I want it all and I want it now”. So many insecurities. I want what you have, but better, faster and cheaper.
It is the way the markets are being driven today and cell phone manufacturers are jumping on that seemingly endless bandwagon.
Yes, the mobile world is here. I know it’s been around for quite some time, but only now are we fully benefiting from the original idea that was the ‘mobile cellular phone’.
One of the best characteristics about Open Source is that it allows the user the chance to improve the product by having access to its source code. Essentially this is what Open Source is, but not many Open Source Software companies advertise that the public can include their own input and change the product so that it becomes more user-friendly.
Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to really see where the challenges lie and where improvements can be made.
Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organisation which offers six different licences which allow creators to easily and freely share their work with others. To put it simply: it is a way to encourage creativity among ‘the commons’. It allows free and legal sharing, use, repurposing and remixing.
So I said we were going to go deeper down the rabbit hole… food aside, here we go…
When dealing with open source, you’ll find that two main companies keep cropping up – the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. Most people would not know the difference between the two.
The best way to sell your product is to know your product so as an initial blog entry I thought I’d explain my product so that my readers (yes, you) would become familiar with open source software.
Firstly, let’s get to grips with open source.Imagine you’re at home, ravenously hungry.You’re not keen for something already-made, like pasta ‘n sauce, or a microwave dinner.You want something specific; something home-made that you know is going to taste great.What do you do?You whip out mom’s old recipe book, turn to page 59 and voila!Mom’s lasagne with her secret white sauce.All the ingredients are there, with cooking instructions to boot.
Open source can be described as the recipe in mom’s book.The recipe is a source code – a freely available collection of statements written in human-readable computer programming language.This of course relates to software, however there are other types of open source and source codes.Imagine that you turn the page of mom’s recipe book and find the recipe for Coca Cola.This would be living in the ideal world though, as Coca Cola guards their source code more fiercely than Malema clutching onto his reputation.
Pharmaceutical companies use source codes; some are freely available and others are not.The same goes for beer.
So now we know loosely what open source is, let’s go deeper down the rabbit hole.
Open source software has been around since computers were invented, well at least the concept has.Before it was known as open source, it was called free software.The term was coined in 1985 by the Free Software Foundation and intended the word 'free' to mean freedom to distribute and not freedom from cost.Because of the ambiguous nature of the name, it was changed to ‘open source’ by the Open Source Initiative, which was founded in 1998.
Universities have been using freely shared software and collaborated between each other to create new programs and new software systems.The great advantage of open source software is that it allows people to study, change and improve the software.
However, open source does just simply mean access to the source code; there are certain requirements which open source software distribution need to meet, which may be found on the Open Source Initiative site.
More information on the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative will be spoken about in the next blog.
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