Applying Yourself to Useful and Inexpensive Applications
Central to the open source philosophy is the idea that information should not be indefinitely defined by the dictations of a market driven product. Those of us who access our developing tools through open sources undoubtedly appreciate the ability to use ever changing sciences to better perform our individual programming missions. The success of source code available to be downloaded by the public and freely used for everything from non-profit to proprietary purposes is a strong indicator that the essential articles of open source software, no matter how much we debate on the philosophical and pragmatic particulars, is in sync with the general belief that information, at least most information, is a human right.
Open source software aficionados who are skilled in the art of application creation, or at least fancy themselves to be, need to consider the implications of OSS applications to serve a greater good. Don’t get me wrong, we must put food on our own table first, and in the world of app creation the money doesn’t exactly pour in for most people serious about it who haven’t caught onto the latest mobile phone novelty. But therein lies the call to action: don’t count on getting wealthy from your application designs in the first place. Most of us hail from a background that burned into our brains the idea that success is measured purely in profit. Recent events are making the big bucks harder and harder to come by, especially in our field.
The middle class lifestyle can be successfully fulfilled through the execution of useful and inexpensive mobile phone application development, if you can harness the power of open source software to produce practical programs. It’s easier than you think. For example if you wanted to make an application for reverse phone lookup, you could store the number on a MySQL table, keep the comments and text box in another table, and construct a cross reference table to retrieve the two. It’d then be a simple query to retrieve all the data related to the number via a PHP app. Now, I’m just brainstorming here and who knows what problems can get in the way, but there’s the rub; nothing is easy after all. But if it’s that easy for me to come up with a useful application example for a blog post, you can’t tell me you can’t think of something else you can make using open source software.
Consider the fundamentals of the open source. The differing takes on the exact liberties pertained to the freedom of application development all agree on the dissatisfaction with absolutism based on a market hierarchy. Information technology should be valued on the marketplace of ideas not within capitalistic constructs that favor those who are in the privileged position to decide what’s good for the rest of us. These same entities are also who operate the majority of digital activity varying from video games to dating services, and thus dictate what is given to us and what isn’t in virtually every facet of our online lives. If you truly believe in the power of the open source, you should embrace the idea that as a talented user of such software you have more than an incentive to use your gift to give the greater good more options, you have an obligation.
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