| What I love about open source |
Oct. 06, 2005
Let's be honest for a moment. How many of us were drawn to Linux because, in comparison with battleship grey Windows boringness and Chardonnay-sipping Mac pretension, Linux seemed... fun?
Maybe it was the wee, cuddly penguin, certainly an unusual emblem for something as serious as an operating system, let alone one that also runs phone networks, supercomputers, and NASA gadgets.
Maybe it was Linus himself, a guy who in contrast to say, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, still seems pretty normal, despite the success. The worst I can think to say about Linus, after writing about Linux since 1998, is that when he finds himself in a room of typically overweight programmers, he tries to make his own belly stick out, too, even though he's not really fat enough to pull it off effectively.
The Linux fun factor doesn't stop with its leader and logo, either. Whacky propeller-head humor seems to infuse it at every level. I'll never forget the first few times I encountered jokes in the Linux manpages. Jokes in the manpages! I just thought that was great. It definitely helped ease the pain of learning to deal with those things.
Nowadays, a lot of Linux gets funded by big companies, and people work on Linux as their job. But it definitely started out as something people did for fun, and that original Linux spirit of fun still comes through, all the time.
I ran into a great example just two days ago.
While cleaning out my laptop case, I ran across an asterisk (*)-shaped CD that I'd been given at LinuxWorld by Digium, the company that maintains the open source Asterisk PBX software package.
I loaded up the CD, and checked out the Flash presentation -- the usual marketing pablum and hokum. In the closed source world, the fun would have ended there.
However, I started browsing around the CD, found the source code directory, and decided to have a look around. Hm, what's this "top_secret" directory? It turned out to contain a few choice samples such as this one. Okay, I thought, maybe I had better go ahead and unpack some of these files and see what these people are up to.
Sure enough, I found a directory with 1,133 sound samples, licensed under the BSD license (since sample files can't really be modified anyway, the readme file author wrote). Most are ordinary voice-overs such as you might hear on any corporate phone tree. They were done by Allison Smith, the Readme says, who does PBX voicemail voices for hire, and is the voice of Asterisk. However, not all the samples are aimed at boring corporate phone trees.
Here, have a listen for yourself. Or, to really get the full effect, download the whole thing, make sure sox is installed, and enjoy with a command such as play *.gsm.
It's little discoveries like this that keep Linux and open source fun, and I hope that never changes. It takes a smart person to be funny, and with open source you definitely get more access to that plentiful, geekly, smart-person humor -- without which lord knows computers sure could be mighty dull.
--Henry Kingman
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