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The Beauty of Open Source Software
Products built by people from all walks of life
Since that rainy Seattle day back in the 90’s when my classmate showed me a Slackware Linux machine built from scrap parts running squid which he had setup to improve web browsing for the whole entire computer lab of Windows and Apple workstations, I have been fascinated with Open Source software. My first reaction was what? It’s FREE? What?! It’s built by a community of people from around the world? How cool is that?!
From that day onward, I progressively did more and more as a user of Linux and open source software but never did I think once, I was perhaps good enough or had anything interesting to offer in terms of building these very same software that I was using on a daily basis since I was not much of a developer and the amazingly talented people around me were simply so much more capable than me in building things from scratch. As a result, I went off for many years as a systems integrator/engineer implementing open source software that other people built; something that I was very good at. Perhaps you can say I had become an evangelist or cheerleader of open source solutions.
Over the years, I deployed systems comprised of open source software for all sizes; solutions as small as for early stage startups all the way to fortune 100 enterprises and…
