2011 was the year everything changed.
'Free software has been around for nearly thirty years now and the Linux OS that powers so much of the Internet has just celebrated its 20th birthday. With the exception of a few small protests made by the Free Software Foundation against that pernicious evil of 'Digital Restrictions Management' the success of free software has been by the power of persuasion. One by one 'the geeks' have shown each other that there are better alternatives to paying a fortune for crappy commercial software. I remember when Linux first came really usable, Windows95 had not even been released. If you had a PC the only choices was buggy Windows 3.1 with 8+3 character file names or Linux with X11 that worked just like $20,000 workstations!
Although great strides have been made in Linux uptake (it runs at the heart of Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and myriad other Internet age companies) there have also been numerous cases where Windows has survived and had large amounts of somtimes public, taxpayers, money spent on this.
Is there any connection I wonder between the status of Microsoft as a particularly powerful corporation and the dogged insistence that its products still get bought and used? Even when the logical solution would be for the users to choose the best in free software to deploy, and spend the money they would have paid year after year towards further development and refinement.
What I hope to do with this blog over the coming months is to explore how the new free and democratic society that the likes of Anonymous and the Occupy movement are in the process of forming with the Free and Open Source software community.
There is much to share in both directions. Tonight I would just like to leave you with some words from an ex CIA agent Robert David Steele who mentions that the Linux community is an example that the new movements can emulate.
It is a really exciting time with great changes about to happen. Will write again as soon as I can.
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