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Paul Frields is heading the fight for software freedom. |
AN ARGUMENT can be
After all, it's where George Washington grew up. It's where the myth of chopping down the cherry tree and standing up ramrod straight to tell his father, "I cannot tell a lie," is supposed to have happened. The story itself is a lie. But he really did become true to himself and fearless here--the man who would stand up to King George III and lead the United States to freedom.
Now it's home to a Paul Frields, a man who's a key figure in the fight for software freedom--a man who's standing up to Microsoft, and who just has to be on Bill Gates' enemies list.
And he'll be helping to host Fredericksburg's Software Freedom Day on Sept. 20 that's part of a global, grassroots effort to convince the public on the importance of software freedom and the availability of free and open source software. The Fredericksburg Linux Users Group
The event essentially asks the question: "Isn't paying for software like throwing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock? And not in a good way?"
Frields, of Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc., is a real player in the open source world, and he lives and works in Fredericksburg. Red Hat, founded in 1995,
"I'm a remote employee, which has its good points and its bad points--but mostly good so far in my experience," Frields says. "Since most of the work done in a collaborative open source project can be done over the Internet, I'm just as connected to my peers here as anywhere else. Fredericksburg is a fairly hospitable place for broadband, but it would be nice to see more public IT infrastructure like free wireless here. Those sorts of improvements are a very big incentive for companies to move into an area--the kind of companies that tend to produce better and higher-paying jobs."
So why should we throw off the shackles of Micro-soft?
"There are a lot of advantages to free software--it's not just free as in cost, but also free as in speech," he says. "In the old proprietary model, customers end up paying money for programmers to sit behind closed doors and design software. What they produce is usually designed, among other things, to sell more software. Many people call this 'lock-in,' and it keeps software from being as good as it can be. There's no incentive for a proprietary software company to make your computer systems work better with someone else's software.
"In the open source model, a much larger group of programmers uses open collaboration to produce software faster, and more efficiently," he says. "One of the goals of open source is the best and most interoperable code. It's also a way to ensure that you're never shackled to a single vendor. Open source is free for anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute. So if you don't like how one vendor performs, you can always pay another, and they are free to change the software to serve you better."
The most well-known open source software company is Red Hat, "but software giants like IBM, Sun, and Novell also have invested many billions of dollars in open source software," Frields says, "because open source builds better software, cheaper."
And it's not just tech geeks who live in Mom's basement using free software.
Federal government agencies that use open source software include the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, Frields says.
Universities like MIT, UC-Berkeley, North Carolina State and the University of Virginia have used open source software for years, he says, as a teaching tool. "Because their students can open up the software and see the underlying code, they learn faster and become more productive at collaboration and at understanding software design and practice," Frields says.
As we look for ways to save money in these tough times, Frields insists that free software can make aging computers young again.
"Apart from the laptop my company provides--which is, admittedly, a pretty nice system--I have three desktop workstations at home, and none of them is newer than 6 years old," he says. " All of them perform as well as some brand-new systems running non-free software.
Fedora's latest release,
Anyone can download Fedora and use it for free.
"But being a collaborative project, we love for people to get involved and help," Frields says. "They don't have to be software programmers; we have artists, marketing gurus, translators, writers, editors, people who identify and report software problems--'bugs'--people who test software, and so forth. "
Give me software freedom or give me a wedgie.
Learn more about Fedora here: join.fedoraproject.org Check out Fedora 10's new features here: fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/FeatureList
Michael Zitz: 540/846-5163
Email: mikez@freelancestar.com
