Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)

“Freedom is the right to be wrong, but not the right to do wrong”

Everybody wants to work on things which pay more money rather than the things which we wanted to work on. Freedom, Innovation, Distribution - One can get these desired things in Open Source. Open Source offers a chance to quench our programming thirst.

You are free to pick and choose between thousands of Open Source projects out there in the Open Source community. Moreover, you are free to decide on how much you want to contribute. You won’t have a boss and you won’t have the pressure of deadlines and schedules.

Let us focus on FOSS - Free and Open Source Software, though the two terms reveal identical meaning, a major conflict between the two has been perceived since ages. The literal meaning of FOSS is intentionally obtained by means of providing freedom to users to study, modify, and improve the features of a software with the availability of Source Code.

Free Software may be termed to be Open Source Software but Open Source Software does not necessarily have to be Free Software. Puzzled?

Free Software - the unintended meaning is “Software you can get for zero price”. Indeed, the intended point is “Software which gives the user certain freedoms”. Open Source Software - the obvious meaning is “You can look at the source code”. However, it does not have to be non-commercial.

The Free Software Foundation grants users with four basic freedoms.

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour.
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community is benefited.

Learn from the best

How many great Open Source developers do you know about? How many of them work or have worked on an Open Source project? I bet there are many names common to both the lists.

Open Source development will help you observe how experienced developers work and their various ways of designing, coding and discussing solutions. You will learn new ideas and new ways of solving problems. The second and probably more important part is that many smart programmers will be looking over your code and will provide review comments which will help you improve yourself. You will learn more efficient or shorter (or both) ways to solve the same problem.

Build a worthy resume

What you tell in your resume are things like contact information, performance in academia, programming languages you know, projects you’ve worked on and other such stuffs. There is very little in this document which can be verified easily. This is a problem for you as well as for the prospective employer because:

• It may not represent you, your skills and your hard work sufficiently enough.
• It makes hiring a game of chance for the prospective employers and prevents them from making more informed decisions.

The best thing about contributing to an Open Source project is that everything you do is public. So you can say things like the following:

• I have worked on this project for the last two years.
• I wrote features X, Y and Z on Project P.
• I have over two hundred posts on the user forum or mailing list.
• I have commit access to the project.
• I am the expert because “I wrote it”.

And your prospective employer can search and verify such things easily. Congratulations, you have just landed on top of the stack of resumes!

Global Warming is an International Issue

Throughout its long history, Earth has warmed and cooled time and again. Climate has changed when the planet received more or less sunlight due to subtle shifts in its orbit, as the atmosphere or surface changed, or when the Sun’s energy varied. But in the past century, another force has started to influence Earth’s climate: humanity!

The average facade temperature of the globe has augmented more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900 and the speed of warming has been almost three folds the century long average since 1970. This increase in earth’s average temperature is called Global warming. More or less all specialists studying the climate record of the earth have the same opinion now that human actions, mainly the discharge of green house gases from smokestacks, vehicles, and burning forests, are perhaps the leading power driving the fashion.

The gases append to the planet's normal greenhouse effect, permitting sunlight in, but stopping some of the ensuing heat from radiating back to space. Based on the study on past climate shifts, notes of current situations, and computer simulations, many climate scientists say that lacking of big curbs in greenhouse gas discharges, the 21st century might see temperatures rise of about 3 to 8 degrees, climate patterns piercingly shift, ice sheets contract and seas rise several feet. With the probable exemption of one more world war, a huge asteroid, or a fatal plague, global warming may be the only most danger to our planet earth.

As said, the major cause of global warming is the emission of green house gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide etc into the atmosphere. The major source of carbon dioxide is the power plants. These power plants emit large amounts of carbon dioxide produced from burning of fossil fuels for the purpose of electricity generation. About twenty percent of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere comes from burning of gasoline in the engines of the vehicles. This is true for most of the developed countries. Buildings, both commercial and residential represent a larger source of global warming pollution than cars and trucks.

Building of these structures require a lot of fuel to be burnt which emits a large amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as effectual as CO2 at entrapping heat in the atmosphere. Methane is obtained from resources such as rice paddies, bovine flatulence, bacteria in bogs and fossil fuel manufacture. When fields are flooded, anaerobic situation build up and the organic matter in the soil decays, releasing methane to the atmosphere. The main sources of nitrous oxide include nylon and nitric acid production, cars with catalytic converters, the use of fertilizers in agriculture and the burning of organic matter. Another cause of global warming is deforestation that is caused by cutting and burning of forests for the purpose of residence and industrialization.

You Can Help Fight Global Warming

Many efforts are being made by various nations to cut down the rate of global warming. One such effort is the Kyoto agreement that has been made between various nations to reduce the emissions of various green house gases. Also many non-profit organizations are working for the cause. Al Gore was one of the foremost U.S. politicians to heave an alarm about the hazards of global warming. He has produced a significantly acclaimed documentary movie called "An Inconvenient Truth," and written a book that archives his advice that Earth is dashing toward an immensely warmer future. Al Gore, the former vice president of United States has given various speeches to raise an awareness of global warming. He has warned people about the ill effects of Global warming and its remedies.

But an interesting side of the global warming episode is that there are people who do not consider global warming as something that is creating a problem. Skeptics of global warming think that global warming is not an ecological trouble. According to the global warming skeptics, the recent enhancement in the earth's average temperature is no reason for alarm. According to them earth's coastlines and polar ice caps are not at a risk of vanishing. Global warming skeptics consider that the weather models used to establish global warming and to forecast its impacts are distorted. According to the models, if calculations are made the last few decades must have been much worse as compared to actually happened to be. Most of the global warming skeptics believe that the global warming is not actually occurring. They stress on the fact the climatic conditions vary because of volcanism, the obliquity cycle, changes in solar output, and internal variability. Also the warming can be due to the variation in cloud cover, which in turn is responsible for the temperatures on the earth. The variations are also a result of cosmic ray flux that is modulated by the solar magnetic cycles.

Ultimately, global warming will impact life on Earth in many ways, but the extent of the change is largely up to us. Scientists have shown that human emissions of greenhouse gases are pushing global temperatures up, and many aspects of climate are responding to the warming in the way that scientists predicted they would. This offers hope. Since people are causing global warming, people can mitigate global warming, if they act in time. Greenhouse gases are long-lived, so the planet will continue to warm and changes will continue to happen far into the future, but the degree to which global warming changes life on Earth depends on our decisions now.