September 15 is more than just another day in the week, it is the celebration of free software!  Software Freedom Day celebrates the importance and impact open source technology has on the world.  It can be found in everything from a mobile phone app to computers at the FBI.  The What They Think? blog takes a look at this special day in the article, “Happy Software Freedom Day: September 15, 2012.”  The open source movement began awhile back over a general consensus of Windows hatred.  Linux came in and fixed most of the problems Windows-haters were experiencing and from further purveyance of the Internet, the open source community has blossomed.  You may wonder about the interest, if you are not familiar with the open source craze:

Those who know my computing habits have long been entertained by my fascination with free software (and my non-Apple life, excepting my iPhone, of course). It’s not a deep frugality, it’s a curiosity about how something that is “free” could actually work well. It turns out that free software is not free, it’s a collaboration of people who share their development work, and the price they pay for the software is their time for developing it. Because so many people share and contribute, the cost works out in everyone’s favor. Many companies found they were paying so much money for licensing that it was less expensive and more reliable to collaborate in open software projects.

The rest of the article provides a list of some of the best free open software available.  It is not until you step back and realize how important open source affects our daily technology usage, do you comprehend how much you rely on it.  Celebrate freedom and may open software continue to prosper!  Another piece of technology we rely on is a reliable search engine.  LucidWorks uses the Apache Lucene platform to power its Cloud and enterprise search apps.

Whitney Grace, September 26, 2012

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