The ascent of open-source technology puts the world at your fingertips. Get a glimpse of a future that already exists.

Just a few years ago, it was hard to imagine using online services—browsers, blogs, chat services—for free. Today, it’s hard to imagine paying for them. In the future, the same will be true for word processors, photo retouching software and spreadsheet programs like the ones that now cost hundreds of dollars. In fact, for those who know where to look, many of these applications are already available for free.
Driving the trend toward cheap, easily available software is the growing popularity of what is commonly called “open-source” technology. Open source is a method, an ethos. It’s created by a community of thousands of independent tech geeks who have, over the past several decades, helped to develop alternative software programs that are now becoming available to mainstream computer users.
Open source is most easily understood as what it is not. Most paramount, it isn’t Microsoft or Mac. Unlike the major software giants, for whom proprietary programming codes are jealously guarded secrets, open-source codes are, well, open. That allows programmers to develop software in much the same way as an article is written on Wikipedia: once a user has written the source code for a program, others voluntarily proofread, improve and update it.
Unlike copyright laws, which prohibit users from altering or copying a product, open-source technology uses a “copyleft” agreement that allows anyone to make changes under certain conditions.
Institutions and companies as diverse as the U.S. Navy, the Brazilian government and IBM have already switched to open-source technology to avoid the costs associated with using programs that are protected by copyright.
The good news for everyone is that the growth of open source communities has generated ready-to-use programs that are similar to Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer, which can be easily downloaded.
Listen to Professor of computer science Steve Bellovin share the ups and downs of open source software.
Get Your Share
Ready to give open-source software a try? Before getting started, take a guided tour of various applications with our tech expert, DigiDave.

Click on each program’s icon to get a short video tutorial by David Cohn, a former editor of the open-source project Assignment Zero in Wired magazine. Read more about DigiDave.
Audacity: Edit sound and music for free.
OpenOffice: Replace Microsoft Office with free open source.
GIMP: Edit photos in a free equivalent to Photoshop.
VLC: Transfer video and audio files across operating systems.
Mozilla Firefox: Avoid crashing when surfing the net.
FireFTP: Save time when accessing remote FTP servers from Firefox.
Drupal: Blog and tap into a vast community.
Take a guided video tour of various free software applications with our tech expert, DigiDaveWhat’s next?
The future is filled with open source projects, here are four worth noticing.

Vote Independently
Sooner or later even Florida is going to decide to forsake hanging chads in favor of electronic voting.
When that happens, some people are going to prefer that the people writing the code underlying the process have no interest in the outcome different from any other citizen. Or, at least, that’s what the Open Voting Consortium—a nonprofit advocacy group of computer scientists, election and policy experts, whose interest lies in electronic voting machines—expects.
They will be displaying their version of the next thing in voting machines at Linux World, a convention that will take place in San Francisco in August.

Get the Web on Your Cell
Free programs for cell phones are likely to be the next big thing in the open source world.
There are already tons of online ring tones, programs and widgets for cell phones, but they often come with a disproportionate amount of hassle and cost. That could soon be changing.
Mozilla Firefox claims to be working on a reliable web browser for phones, which should be available for free in a couple of months. One enormous benefit: you will then be able to easily download a Flash application and read FLYP on your iPhone!

Drive Without Having to Drive
Stanford University engineers and students have created a driverless car nicknamed “Junior,” using Linux and other open source collaborations.
The robot car scans its surroundings every ten seconds using sophisticated software and decides how to proceed. Junior can also be operated as a normal car, by switching from computer to human control.
Last November, Junior placed second in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a competition for driverless cars to be operated in urban war zones, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Junior could have prosaic uses as well: he could become everyone’s favorite designated driver.

Take Back the iPhone
In November, the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of several companies including Google, HTC, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel and NVIDIA, introduced the open-source software platform Android.
Android does for ordinary cell phones what Apple does for the iPhone. Any cell phone running Android can now sport a home screen with desktop-like icons, use google maps, etc.— without buying into either Apple or ATT’s monopoly of the iPhone.
And, since Android is open source, users are likely to develop new applications and continuously improve the platform.
Check out our supplementary story on one of the most successful open-source projects, One Laptop Per Child.Hidden Out in the Open
Open-source products are hard to track, but they are everywhere.

Over the years, the concept of an open-source community has changed. In 1991, from a dorm room in Helsinki, 21-year-old Linus Thorvald sent a message into cyberspace asking “everyone out there” to help him to build a new operating system.
It was the beginning of Linux, an operating system that has become one of open source’s greatest success stories.
Enough people have responded, added content, downloaded and built upon Linux that it now ranks with Mac OS as the only significant competitors to Windows.
Indeed, Linux source code was so innovative that Mac OS X incorporated components from Linux into its kernel. However, unlike both Windows and Mac OS, Linux is free and can be found on ready-to-use computers for under $200.
Many companies have already taken advantage of the operating system and asked for development assistance from the open-source community. One of the most striking examples is the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, which has sent 500,000 green Linux-based XO laptops to the third world.
Walter Bender, president of One Laptop Per Child, said that help from the open-source community has been essential to the project.
The use of independent developers kept costs down and contributed creative twists like a program that measures the distance between two computers. Among other feats, kids in the third world can place a computer on the ground and another on their head to measure their own height. They also help them to solve problems in math class.
“Even people who have decided not to use open source use it, although they don’t know it,” said Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research, an information technology research and advisory company.
Because open-source products are free, their usage is difficult to track.
Analysts at Optaros, a software consulting firm, estimate that there are more than 140,000 open source projects in development.
The most commonly known is probably Mozilla Firefox. According to Global Market Share Statistics, Firefox was the second most-used browser after Microsoft Internet Explorer in April 2008. Open-source technology has also been integrated in everything from TiVo to Motorola, Access and Nokia cell phones.