Open source software has become quite popular lately and I think it’s awesome that free software like Amarok, Open Office, GIMP and so on, are becoming so good that they not only rival their paid counterparts, but surpass them in many ways.

I think this is because open source stuff contributes to productivity. Not necessarily personal, but community productivity. Wordpress is open source and free and I modified a theme to go with my blog. I am modding it more and more every day, and at the end I will simply release it for everyone to download. It may not be the best theme, but hopefully some people will find joy in it, use it and mod it further to make it better. This way I can contribute in some small way to the community and I am happy that I can, or at least that I try.

The very nature of open source gives people the impetus to create and share, to contribute productively to the community. In time the community becomes very large and software takes off. I mean Microsoft has about 79,000 employees, but many of them work on different projects, so apart from Windows, I would bet that only 100 or so people work on one thing at a time. I think at least people in the thousands are working to make Wordpress better all the time, not necessarily by code, and that’s the point.

You can contribute with what you know. Design a theme, write the code, create a widget, just promote it, tell you friends about it, and so on. You can also be an active and productive member of the community if you can’t do any of these. Look at forum, share your ideas, offer help and so on.

I think this is what’s great about open source, it creates itself, and along the way it finds talents, creates friendships, induces productivity and creativity and overall, is much-much greater that the sum of its parts.