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COLUMN: Reforming a digital pirate(Comtex Business Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)LAWRENCE, Kan., Apr 20, 2006 (University Daily Kansan, U-WIRE via COMTEX) --Buying software in a box was an alien concept to me from day one of my digital life. In the early 90s, a respected veterinarian gave me my first pirated copy of Windows 3.1. I traded war games with the son of the man that ran a local church camp. Most people in my small home town hadn't even heard of the Internet yet. As the Internet exploded, I continued my piracy on a grander scale. PR campaigns and increasingly complex copy protection didn't slow me. The first hiccup in my pirate life came as a letter from lawyers representing the Motion Picture Association of America and my Internet Service Provider. In 2002, my roommate and I had been running a Web site hosting thousands of movies, songs and software, freely trading whatever we could get our hands on. The letter, threatening legal action and the loss of Internet service, justifiably worried us. We killed the server. With our pipeline to free goodies down and fear that our ISP was scanning our traffic, I went in search of new ways to get programs. Not long after, I discovered open source software. The definition of open source is hard to pin down. It typically refers to free software developed by a community of programmers. They release the source code so that others can modify the program, learn from it or improve it. To some reading this, the concept may be a decade old topic. Based on recent conversations I've had though, many of my peers seem not to know about the existence of these programs. I've been a huge fan of open source software since my introduction to the topic through Abiword, a free word processor. As students, you can benefit from using open source programs. Why pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars for programs if you can get free, quality equivalent tools? Adobe Photoshop CS2 runs $600 for a retail copy at Wal-Mart. Microsoft Office can cost $500. Dustin Brown, software engineer, Networking and Telecommunications Services, said the college has released two open source projects to Sourceforge. The programs, RINGS and ANSR, assist behind-the-scenes telecommunication and security processes at the college. You have probably used open source programs without realizing it. Many campus computers sport Mozilla Firefox. Widely considered more secure than Microsoft's Internet Explorer, a KU Web site states: "Highly recommended that everyone stop using Internet Explorer for web browsing and use Mozilla Firefox instead." I want KU to start recommending more open source tools to students. Our college already recognizes the superiority of Firefox. Do the same for other worthy projects. Help yourself and support open source developers by checking out their software . |