Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Today nothing technical, If we look at the Wikipedia to broaden the discourse and the open source community.

Com’è noto, Wikipedia does not present any type of advertising between its pages, even conveyed. This is a great advantage for the user, it translates into a disadvantage in terms of income for those who build Wikipedia. So how do you “stand” the entire property? Who pays the web space? The answer is simple: users of goodwill that, the hands of the credit card, decide to donate part of their wealth to philanthropic association of the same name, la Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia is the most obvious project that proves that the’Unity is strength. It has achieved excellence in few years (I still remember when the items were few and fragmentary) and yet are added, controlled, also eliminate encyclopaedic entries at a rate serratissimo, involving millions of people around the world. As recited a famous slogan appeared in the pages of Wikipedia “When you need there's always Wikipedia, Now she's the one I need you, make your contribution” it is necessary that all contribute, in various ways, progress of the project or die. I find Wikipedia a wonderful project, a project untied from companies and minority interests, a free and collaborative, a project that still has nothing to envy (quite the opposite) Encyclopedias recognized.

The same philosophy of Wikipedia was adopted years before it was founded by the open source world. One of the slogans of open source is just “Free as in freedom, not as free beer“, dispelling any doubts about the connotation of the word “free“, which in English means both “Free” that “free“. In short, the free software relies on the collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to the given project, from application new features, to drafting code, to correction di bug, to tester, translators and so on and so forth. All people who are not paid and performs this work for fondness, because it is rewarding to be useful to someone else, have part of a community potentially endless when you have a goal that you have chosen. Just in this first speech is part of the project “Ardour“. Ardour is a DAW sequencer initially developed exclusively for Linux, led to follow also Mac OS X. It is also a version for Windows. Ardour has in its development team five engineers, who give themselves a target monthly 4.500 dollars, a salary just enough to get by them, undoubtedly lower than the all'income Steinberg or of Ableton that need to feed several employees, but totaling approximately one thousand euro each time it is sold a copy of Cubase di AbletonLive.

It is this evidence that capitalism is the real engine of the world, without money is not going anywhere, and open source has not yet found a formula for certain self-finance its projects. A dust’ is also why the graphics software (cito PhotoShop, the most famous) are actually more advanced compared to open source alternatives such as Gimp the Krita: developers PhotoShop devote all their working time to writing software, those dedicated Gimp few hours if all goes well of their free time.

In contrast are Canonical and Red Hat. These are the two companies for most taxpayers (I would call them even “maintainer“) the financing of their software open source “Ubuntu” and “Fedora“. These two companies have decided to release your work under open source license, with the collaboration of all the volunteers and the fruits of labor are available to all. Also financially support their respective projects and in turn develops the tools to improve their own distribution dropping them always under open source licenses. The result is a software usable, simple such as Windows, if not more (I mention it to be the most famous), secure much more than Windows, but not advertised. Companies Canonical and Red Hat (in this case) of living provision of services, not product or software, and the proceeds are obviously not sufficient heavily to advertise the product being advertised such as Windows (for each computer sold Microsoft earns 200 approximately EUR, Canonical nothing).

Open source software has come from years to a point where it can be used both by experienced programmer, that from’used accounting not so young that until recently did not know the difference between the screen and the computer. The only truly valid vehicle for the dissemination of open is the school. The school of today shape tomorrow's workers, if you do not make engineers will however, consumer. This is where we must begin with the urge to create. And I appeal to the government and to the Government. Is it possible that no one in Italy has yet noticed the FLOSS?