Richard M. Stallman from the documentary film “Revolution OS”
In a recent post, HotWax Systems CEO Mike Bates explained how your IT future may depend on bridging the conceptual divide between proprietary enterprise software and open source enterprise software. Bridging that divide begins with a commitment to sharing and collaboration.
From childhood, we are taught about the important roles that both sharing and collaboration fulfill in our society. We’ve all heard the term “sharing is caring”. Sharing is also profitable, smart and the right thing to do. There are many reasons why sharing and collaboration are essential to the forward movement of the software industry.
Richard M. Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1984 in an attempt to create his own Unix-like operating system that was freely shareable. He also started the Free Software movement to espouse his political agenda of freely-shared intellectual property. Stallman’s philosophical and technical work became the foundation for Linux and the Open Source movement.
In the documentary Revolution OS(1:03) Stallman addresses the importance of sharing. At one point, he can be seen displaying a hand-lettered sign reading “With Free Software You Have Freedom.” At another point in the video he explains his philosophy:
“When I was a kid and I went to school, the teacher who was trying to teach us to share said if you bring some candy you can’t eat it all yourself, you’ve got to share with other kids…. you’ve got to have good will, the willingness to help other people, that’s the basis of the society, thats the fundamental resource.”
The free and open source revolution in the software industry is a great example of the importance and value of sharing. From its inception, HotWax Systems has actively promoted the sharing of open source initiatives and has committed to use open source softwares/products to build and deliver solutions for various industry segments.
This philosophy truly inspires us as a company, and because we promote open source projects like Apache OFBiz and Moqui, it’s essential to center our team on this philosophy.
In keeping with our commitment to serve the developer community our HotWax University training program for HotWax team members focuses on the technical side of open source, with a solid emphasis on understanding open source philosophy–and living it.
As previously mentioned, the documentary Revolution OS covers the open source evolution process in great detail and shows how it has benefited the developer community around the world. We have these types of documentaries and other videos in our training plan to help trainees get a real sense of what the movement is about. A playlist of these videos can be accessed here.
HotWax Systems continues to demonstrate a real-world commitment to support the open source revolution by launching Apache OFBiz Accelerator, an open source, enterprise-class, digital commerce platform that offers complete ownership and control with absolutely no licensing fees. You can learn more about the platform here.
