Open Source Values

[Ben Kelley]

My non political contribution

My personal feeling on OSS,  it opens up the world of software to even
those who cannot afford $oftware. With out apache,  nobody would be
running a personal webserver because they couldn't afford netscape
enterprise server.  Without linux/*BSD there would be very few unix
admins, software geeks, and budding developers. OSS gave internet to
the people,  think of how small the internet was before OSS existed, 
it made the internet more accessible.  In my opinion it created the
dotcom boom.  Without OSS think of how many projects and networks
wouldn't have been able to even get past the planing stage.  OSS made
it easy to take commodity hardware, alittle bandwidth and create
something that impacts the world.  Think google, thats how they
started.

I'm not a linux user, infact I don't like alot about linux, but fact
is redhat 5 and freebsd 2.x got me started.  I personally think alot
of OSS is crap, kludgey, hard to work with, hard to get working and
maintain, but there are also things like mysql, apache, php, bind,
qmail, postfix, firefox/mozilla/thunderbird, BitchX. Those things
allow me to do my job and more, they are all great products.   To me
that is what OSS is all about.