In a previous post, I discussed what exactly is the Internet of Things and what are the components in an IoT system. From that post, we can reckon that IoT’s components constantly talk to each other in order to garner a wealth of data and provide insights to the users of the system. People across the world converse in different languages and it is particularly difficult for different groups of people to talk to each other unless official and national languages are set and embraced. Likewise, different companies make different products and for them to be able to talk to each other seamlessly, free and standard ways of communication must be established. Continue reading “Openness and Standards: The Lingua Franca”
Category: Open Source
Switching to open source solutions in 100 days: Part 3
In Part 1 of this series, I explained how I slowly shifted based from proprietary solutions to open source solutions for various types of tools that I was using. In Part 2, I gave an overview of the paradigm shifts necessary to mentally prepare ourselves to switch from Windows to Linux. In this third and final part, I will walk through some rough sketch steps and my personal experience and tips of the big shift from Windows to Linux, which completed my switch from pirated proprietary software to open source solutions once and for all.
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Switching to Open Source solutions in 100 days: Part 2
This post is the Part 2 in a series of posts where I describe how I switched my personal computer from pirated closed source solutions to completely open source solutions.
In Part 1, I discussed how I started swapping open source solutions for closed source solutions in Windows XP. A lot of these software tools are multi-platform and they run on all operation systems such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS. For instance, I described GIMP for photo editing and VLC for playing audio and video. Once I got fluent at using these various tools, it was time for me to make the biggest change of all, i.e. to uninstall Windows and install and use Linux permanently. This can be a very intimidating change and I would like to dedicate this post to introduce some principles of Linux that must be understood before preparing for the big change. Continue reading “Switching to Open Source solutions in 100 days: Part 2”
How going Open Source empowers you: Part 2
In the last post How going Open Source empowers you: Part 1, we saw the advantages for someone who chooses to use open source software. In order to use open source software, someone must first decide to release such software. But the very nature of open source software is that the secret sauce, i.e. the source code is released along with the software. Does this make business sense?
Continue reading “How going Open Source empowers you: Part 2”
How going Open Source empowers you: Part 1
One of the most common buzzwords used in technology today is ‘Open Source’. We keep hearing every now and then that a company A has made its offering open source. And on the other hand, we hear that a company B has switched its entire systems from proprietary solution X to open source solutions Y. And it is not tiny organisations that we are talking about. It is companies like Google, Oracle and Apache. Now before we see why those companies are using open source products and why they making their products open source, we need to understand what is open source.
Continue reading “How going Open Source empowers you: Part 1”
Switching to open source solutions in 100 days: Part 1
Coming up today, is an interesting story that happened 13 years ago, when I began a 100-day exercise to shift my personal computer from using pirated proprietary software to completely open source software.
Continue reading “Switching to open source solutions in 100 days: Part 1”