*This Is Not Related to The Open Source Initiative
Today I am pleased to announce my first web project of 2008. Back in late December (on the old blog, Rest in Peace) I decided that all of my works would be released under a Creative Commons license, aka Open Source. Well, today I want to talk about how I am going to help bring that to everyone else. It is called the Open Source Software Initiative.
I came up with the idea after looking at the MacHesit 2 bundle of Mac OS X applications (11 ones for a 75-80% price lower than all of them combined), all of the money which went to charity. After a certain number of people bought the package, another application was unlocked for people who purchased the bundle previously, and to everyone else. Instead of waiting to make your application lower priced (essentailly free for charity), why not release the source to not only benifit people who would have stole it anyway, but improve the software to something that a company couldn’t do. That is the power of open source.
When people think of open source, most think of Linux. Yes, it is open source. Yes, it is powerful and has come a long way than most people would have thought, but my personal favorite open source project is phpBB (bulletin board software, http://www.phpbb.com). The recently released version, Olympus, is a major milestone in my opinion. I remember back in my early internet days (2005-2006) running a forum using phpBB 2.x. It may have taken a long time to bring it into the future, but it was worth it. When people get together and work on a project, it really helps to advance it in ways a corporation couldn’t do.
Another major advantage of open source software is bugs. Everything has bugs and glitches, it is a fact. But when everyone has access to the code, it becomes so much easier to fix the issue. No longer do major companies have to put their best people at work to find a little bug when the community can find it and fix it faster than ever possible before.
So, how do I plan on doing this? Most companies wouldn’t give anything away for free, let alone making it open source. Today is the day I announce the Open Source Software Initiative (OSSI), and it will launch on March 1st, 2008. From March 1st to March 1st, 2009, I want the internet community, including companies, software groups, and independant developers to release their software under an open source license (check out the Creative Commons link in my sidebar). How many pieces of software? 50. Just 50. That is just one piece of software a week (seeing as though there are 366 days this year). Simple release a piece of freeware, shareware, or commercial software under a Creative Commons/Open Source license and request to be added to the Initiative. Once we approve your request to join, you are added to the list and we up the counter by one. Once we hit fifty, whether in a month, year, or a decade, we will officially end the first Open Source Innitiative.
Pretty soon I will be begining the system for people to join. We will have two groups of people, Supporters and Members. Supporters are pretty much the consumers and regular people who will benifit from this (yes, developers too :)). Members are companies, groups, and independant developers who go Open Source for the initiative.
I hope, together at least, we can get closer to a future of amazing open source software.