I have been and will always be a staunch advocate of the open source philosophy. For those who don’t know what the open source philosophy is, essentially it’s the belief that the users of a piece of software have the right to edit, expand and redistribute it as long as they also provide the same rights to the users they distribute it to. Take WordPress, for example. Anyone can go to WordPress.org right now and download all the source code, not only free of charge but also free of restrictions. You can create your own themes for it or your own plugins for it. If you wanted, you could branch it off and use it as the basis for an entirely new blogging platform. You could even rename it “Super Awesome Blogging Software” and sell it for $20 a download. The only thing you can’t do is limit other people’s right to do the same. I think this is a pretty healthy philosophy because it means we get to benefit from the best everyone has to offer. We get from the community and also give to the community. Instead of Microsoft or Apple deciding what we need and what we don’t, we can decide for ourselves while saving hundreds of dollars in licensing and upgrade fees. For this reason, in the past week or two I’ve used Linux almost exclusively. Linux is a free and open source operating system for your computer and, as it turns out, a pretty slick, powerful and productive beast! I’ve set up my computer to be a minimalist’s and a productivity guru’s dream. This series will show how you can do the same!

Continue Reading »