Mimentum Blog

Posted By Mimenta on July 19, 2010

You have a great Operating System, whether it is Windows, Snow Leopard or Linux.

How do you think it got that good?

Stop and think for a minute – do you really believe that some programmer slaved away one dark night over a keyboard and wrote it?

Software isn’t just designed then written on some keyboard – it evolves.

Let me illustrate:

If I want to write a program, I first have to write it for my computer – say a PC with an Athlon processor and heaps of RAM
Fred down the road, has a different computer – let’s say a PC with an Intel Duo processor and a wider screen.

If I want the “Freds” in the world to use my program, I have to write it to run on both types of computer.
There’s the “Bobs” with i5 processors, “Tony’s” with i7 processors, the “Janes” with Athlon Phenom processors, some have wide screens, some have normal screens, some have Nvidia graphics cards, others have theirs embedded. Then there’s the “Joes” who run laptops. The “A Type Joes” who use Intel processors and the “B Type Joes” who use AMD processors in their lap tops.

I’ll give the “Xaviers” using their MACs a miss. They are a small market share (a bit stubbornly weird) and need a completely different program code. (Also since Steve Jobs has forgotten about them since he launched the iPhone and the iPad, they will gradually get left behind and have to switch to a more mainstream brand anyway).

So my simple program has now had several rewrites and I haven’t catered for my customers with different system settings, less RAM, different video cards, running older operating systems and other variants of Linux etc.

The truth is, any software company needs people to prove out new software code over a wide range of computers. If it was left to corporations alone, half the software wouldn’t run on your computer and you would still be running a less buggy upgrade of Windows 98.

This is where the Open Source Community comes to the rescue.
I write my software program code and publish it on an Open Source Community site, like Sourceforge.net. I publish it without all the chrome trimmings of course. Other people will try it and give me feedback. Some folks are experts and will modify it, saving me the job. After a month or two, I retrieve the code, add the chrome trimmings and a fancy box, to flash it up and put it on the retail market. It is now reliable, having been tested on a wide range of computers. In return for their testing the people who use Sourceforge get free software -  everyone wins.

It’s not rocket science and it’s nothing new – without Open Source you wouldn’t have any new software. No corporation can afford to write software and test it on so many different variations of computers. Companies  like Microsoft, Adobe, Corel and a host of well known software names have all used open source to develop their code.

The Open Source Community even has a rating guide to let you know how far down the testing track the software has come:

Alpha means new code – best left to the expert programmers and developers.
Beta – this software has been tested on some machines and is cutting edge stuff but you may have problems. This is best left to the experts.
Stable – this has finished it’s testing and should work on your machine. This is the stuff less the chrome and fancy box (often it has the chrome too!)

Keep in mind that in return for getting the software free, you are part of the testing cycle and as such are obliged to report any glitches. After all it is a community and it’s success depends on all of us doing our share.

Categories: Business, Computing, Education, Mimentum
Tags: Business information, business on line, computers, Internet security, Operating Systems, Software, Website design