The Growing of GNU Project and The Open Source Community
The future of the $100 laptop, in 2017
Description
There are a lot of people who hold a strong belief that free software is a matter of liberty, not price. It is a matter of freedom to run, study, change and improve the program. And most importantly, people should be free to use the software in all the ways that are socially useful.
Started in 1984 by MIT programmer Richard Stallman to create a Unix-like operating system, the GNU project has become the major force against the domination of Microsoft and other commercial software makers. Over more than a decade it has created a huge pool of programs to challenge the production of those commercial companies. You can find free software for robust compilers and operating systems (e.g. Linux, Java) to application suites to substitute Microsoft Office.
Although at the early stage most programmers only develop these free softwares as a pastime, the trend has changed significantly that most of them are committing themselves full time. This is one of the factors that support the growing of the GNU and in turn adds more varieties of free software to lower down the cost of computer systems.
With this huge availability of open systems, the One Laptop Per Child project has the opportunity to create an ultra-low-cost system. It has also the chance to even improve the systems or creating the possibility price reduction further in the future.
The extensive range of free software is also the essential factor that allows the $100 laptop to pack itself with extensive applications (word processors, browsers, graphic toolkits, multimedia toolkits and much more) in only such a minimum price.
Enablers
1. Domination Microsoft and other software giants
2. Growing social awareness from the computer society
3. Voluntary contributions from the community (programmers, users, contributors)
Inhibitors
1. Limited functionalities and software support for open source programs.
2. Software giants’ bigger capacities and resources to develop software with better functionalities and support to play down the open source community.
3. Voluntary system that does not bound the responsibility of the contributors.
Paradigms
1. These days the GNU project and softwares under its licences are becoming more popular and are--in some areas--competing harshly with Microsoft's products. Take--for example--the growing and extensive use of Java language and applications both in computers and other mobile devices. MySQL is also getting a huge makeover and now are used more widely as a replacement of the expensive commercial softwares.
2. Some of the GNU licence softwares are also getting commercial. Despite this, normally they create two market segments that is the free open source that stays the same and the commercial one with an extra technical support.
Web Resources
[Linux]