Open Source

A very interesting post over at O'Reilly has me thinking about Open Source. The bloke asks what the "most important" Open projects currently are.

My answer (search for "JRice") complains that the question wasn't very clear. ...Still, it's a heart-warming subject, and I loved the thought of it so much I thought I would make a list of projects that I have enjoyed and appreciated over the years (in order that they occur to me):

• FreeBSD
• Fedora
• RedHat Linux
• GNome, KDE, Enlightenment
• Perl, Ruby, Python
  
• vim (and vi)
  
• MySQL
• pine
• The GIMP
• WAMP (Apache, specifically)
  
• MediaWiki
• TWiki (well, I do think MediaWiki is far superior, but... I did use this...)
• imageMagick
• GCC (of course!)
• Wikipedia (not all things "Open" are programs!)
• OGG Voribis
• tcsh and bash
• Mozilla (Firefox)
• Firefox plugins... particularly FireBug (!), AdBlock, and SessionManager
• Eclipse / RadRails
• Java
• OpenOffice
• PGP (!)
• GhostReader
• YAML
• Wine :)
• Jabber
• SSH (and PuTTY)
  

...In making this list, I'm reminded of how incredibly rich the Open Source world is, and I'm more than a bit ashamed to think that I hardly run half of these apps today, in lieu of their commercial counterparts. It's making me seriously re-consider scrapping the whole Windows thing on my home machine. Screw.

...There are really two big reasons that I haven't already done this: music and games. But I think it has come time to reconsider this decision. Music is a money pit, and games could easily be switched over to a nice new PS3, which I'd like to get sometime this year, anyway.

And, hey: I have a Windows license... I can just run Wine, when desperate!

I going to do it.

...And, yes, I know I have been profoundly silent, of late. It's mostly because I'm busy on 43 things.