We browse the Internet every single day. While going to school we scroll through all these headlines and click-bait titles. At home we put "heart" at our friend's photo we like on Instagram. We can't even notice when this becomes our daily routine. I won't be writing about addiction to the Internet - it's a topic for a completely different article. I want to focus on something different. It's worth seeing that our all "tech bliss" is owned by just a few companies. But it's convenient for us, so why should we bother? I couldn't agree more - it is convenient indeed. But what is even more terrifying is the fact that we almost admire all these companies.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page - they all were leaders of businesses originated in the land of milk and honey - Silicon Valley. Don't we want to be like them? Be the hero of an innovative era? Of course, some of us want. It's nothing wrong - these people achieved incredible things in their lives when it comes to business. They were leaders, great leaders and their companies are... well just companies, there's nothing special about it but people.
Today for a great majority of people first association with the word "IT" is business. Why shouldn't we be surprised? We're surrounded by a vast amount of tech businesses, starting from tech giants to small local startups. While many programmers and developers are satisfied with their job and actually like what they're doing, some people still think about IT primary as a source in which we can squeeze as much money as we can from. For a long time, the biggest tech companies had that business strategy. Hopefully, this is changing.
I think we've forgotten about the primary aim of tech - making things simple. For some time we're asking ourselves first "how much we can earn on that?" instead of "how can we solve problem x?". This misuse of question generated lots of projects and ideas which was useless or even ended before they started because of a lack of vision of their leaders.
It was especially visible in the 90s. After the dot-com bubble on the stock market, which was caused by excessive speculation in Internet-related companies, many businesses fizzled. Investors thought that businesses they are investing in would accomplish success as huge as Microsoft did. Just to remind you it was the time when the most well-known Microsoft products had been Windows 95 and Internet Explorer. That two revolutions - one in the field of operating systems and another one in browsers segment, was designed by Microsoft as proprietary software. It means it was protected from redistributing or copying and you could use that only the way the author wants you to. That time Microsoft thought that keeping their programs' source codes sealed is the best strategy to keep hegemony in the IT sector.
At the same time, a group of people worked on a project called Linux. The main part of this project (Linux kernel) was written by one man - Linus Torvalds, then other people became contributors to this project. Unlike Windows, Linux was free software, moreover, it's source code is publicly available until this day.
Funny thing is that after more than 20 years the most popular operating system worldwide is Linux, a project originated at someone's home, not Windows - the product of a giant company. You may ask where we can find Linux? Linux is practically everywhere. It powers the majority of web servers, some aircraft's electronic systems rely on it as well as New York Stock Exchange, it might be even in your phone and you don't realize it (pss. Android is also Linux distribution).
So what made Linux so successful? It's powered by the community - everyone can contribute to the software. But it all comes to a trivial thing, we're learning since kindergarten - collaboration is a key to everything. (I'm quite convinced I'm not talking about cheating ;). Do you see? We are better than the biggest tech companies - we realized faster that despite that each of us has different goals we can cooperate.
Lesson learned. Today we're using open-source (open-sourced software) everywhere. I'm afraid we could risk a breakdown of nearly every device in the world if we would decide to remove open-source from our reality as by magic. Every programming language has its own package library where everyone can put their code to use for free by others.
If all of that is free here's comes a question - "Cool that it's free, but as a contributor what can I get?". It's reasonable, people want to be rewarded for their work. The answer is simple - certainly, this reward is not money. People often make a small part of commercial projects open-sourced, so either way, they earn money from the company they work for. Other ones are just open-source freaks who want to make a world a better place with code. Personally, my "reward" as open-source project maintainer and contributor is the fact that people use things I coded. It's also a wonderful opportunity to work with professionals and learn from them, regardless if they are in California, Tokyo, or Europe. Moreover, it's all without signing any contract nor agreement!
Open-source is for me going back to the roots where IT originated from - a question "how can we simplify things around?". And it also shows that strength is in numbers and collaboration of course.
Thanks to that scientists took a photo of the black hole. When with a single line of code you can put efforts of dozens of people into your project even astrophysics becomes easier :)
But besides open-source, there's another community-driven movement I would like to introduce you to.
A few years ago I saw somewhere online that there is a meetup group called "Code For Poland" (polish branch of Code For All organization). I don't why I went for tech meetup as a kid but I did and I'm happy because of it. For 11-years-old I was amazed by the things they were doing and also by the meetup atmosphere. I learned a few things back then, a few things I didn't understand, but I found out what "Code For Poland" does as an organization. It focuses on "civic tech". Bizzare name but for a simple goal. Civic tech is a technology created by the community to improve things around us. It can be almost anything which helps given society. I remember one lady was coordinating a project of fact-checking website, another guy created an app to distinguish local products by barcode. You can also say that they work for free but they are social activists to make the world a better place! Besides the aim of civic tech is not the tech itself but creating a positive impact on society by using tech and sometimes more importantly public data as a tool. It's quite important. Recently I returned to them after a long break and I'm coordinating the project which is a search engine for high schools in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. In Poland, students choose a high school they want to go through an online system that is not prepared well. I encountered the problem, because I'm in the first class of high school, and I tried to fix it.
This is the way we should look for when thinking about IT. We should always think about the impact we can make.
Open-source and civic tech show us that even huge things are possible but with support of the community. Contribute to open-source and participate in civic tech projects and next discovery or social change can be done thanks to your efforts!
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