Open source is no longer just about the software that sits on your computer. Open methods are being used to develop everything from better automobiles to life altering medical devices.
The Video Screening Room
This inspiring short video from Red Hat, uploaded Monday to YouTube, suggests why open source methods can yield flourishing results.
If you’re an open source enthusiast, make sure you are subscribed to the Red Hat Videos YouTube channel to stay in the loop about future videos they upload. Maybe one of those videos will cover some open source project you’re working on. Also, ask yourself what youngsters do I know who would find this video to be inspiring. Share the link to this video with them and you will have planted a seed that could someday grow into a mighty oak.
For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.
Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing, Phil!
The whipple, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the whippletree.
I’ve sometimes thought there should be open source restaurant/coffee shop franchises. Wikified, like.
I mean, the appeal of a Starbucks as opposed to an independent coffee shop is that wherever you are, if you see a Starbucks you know what you will get, and if you’re not feeling adventurous you’ll prefer that to an independent which is an unknown quantity (might be better, sure, but might be worse, and you won’t know what you like on the menu).
And for someone running a coffee shop, the appeal of running a Starbucks instead of just rolling your own is to a fair extent that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. You got your procedures and recipes and POS software and all kinds of stuff like that all already figured out solidly. But on the downside, you got no freedom–you can’t introduce your own, better recipes or ideas, you have to pretty much do it the Starbucks way.
So it might be nice to have an open source alternative where you have that knowledge base online and if you’re running a coffee shop using that knowledge base you can contribute “code”–recipes, improved procedures or what have you. And someone could, like, offer services analogous to some of the things central Starbucks does, and people could buy those services or not or get them from someone else. And one of those alternative vendors, or a group of “users”, could fork the “codebase” for a coffee shop with a different emphasis. And so on.