Welcome to the newest incarnation of www.mikeservis.com. Because I'm an advocate of Open Source, Free Software, Internet, and just about anything to do with technology. The Linux Mascot "TUX" is one of my favorite critters. To me, he stands for the free exchange of ideas. In 1999 a scruffy programer by the name of Eric Raymond wrote a book called the Cathedral and the Bazaar. In it he discribes two very different methods of software developement and gives examples of both. The Cathedral model, in which source code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of software developers. GNU Emacs and GCC are presented as examples, and the Bazaar model, in which the code is developed over the Internet in view of the public. Raymond credits Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project, as the inventor of this process.

In a world full of greedy business tactics you'd think a project that was freely distributed via the Internet to thousands of hackers world wide would soon crumble, but that's not what happened — not by any stretch of the imagination. Linux was originally started by a graduate student in Helsinki in the early '90's. Today Linus is an icon for the open source software movement. He tells his story here. Linux is 30,000,000 home users strong and growing. It was born on the Internet and today literally runs the technology world. Asking how many Linux machines are in the world today is a difficult question. Everyone who searches Google, picks up a phone and uses the telecommunication infrastructure, watches new televisions, uses a new camera, makes a call on many modern cell phones, trades a stock on a major exchange, watches a weather forecast generated on a supercomputer, logs into Facebook, navigates via air traffic control systems, buys a netbook computer, checks out at a cash register, withdraws cash at an ATM machine, fires up a quick-boot desktop (even those with Windows), or uses one of many medical devices; the list goes on and on."

Linux is the open source poster child, but there are hundreds — if not thousands of very popular open source projects on the net today. This website was created with joomla 1.5 an open source CMS (content management system) The back end consists of mySQL and PHP — both long time open source projects. There is a basic philosophy that gives us clues to its success. In the stories and videos that dot this web a common theme will become apparant. It's nothing I can tell you if you're not ready to hear it. It's an exciting ride — at least I think so. Are you ready?