Please note that this section was written in 2003, so some of this might sound quaint to you :-)
"Free/Libre and Open Source Software", in short, FLOSS1 is based on the concept of a community, which itself is based on the concept of sharing, and particularly the sharing of knowledge. FLOSS are free for usage, modification and redistribution.
If you have already read this book, then you are already familiar with FLOSS since you have been using Python all along and Python is an open source software!
Here are some examples of FLOSS to give an idea of the kind of things that community sharing and building can create:
Linux2
This is a FLOSS OS kernel used in the GNU/Linux operating system. Linux, the kernel, was started by Linus Torvalds as a student. Android is based on Linux. Any website you use these days will mostly be running on Linux.
Ubuntu3
This is a community-driven distribution, sponsored by Canonical and it is the most popular GNU/Linux distribution today. It allows you to install a plethora of FLOSS available and all this in an easy-to-use and easy-to-install manner. Best of all, you can just reboot your computer and run GNU/Linux off the CD! This allows you to completely try out the new OS before installing it on your computer. However, Ubuntu is not entirely free software; it contains proprietary drivers, firmware, and applications.
LibreOffice4
This is an excellent community-driven and developed office suite with a writer, presentation, spreadsheet and drawing components among other things. It can even open and edit MS Word and MS PowerPoint files with ease. It runs on almost all platforms and is entirely free, libre and open source software.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOSS 2 http://www.kernel.org
3 http://www.ubuntu.com 4 http://www.libreoffice.org/
Appendix: FLOSS
Mozilla Firefox5
This is the best web browser. It is blazingly fast and has gained critical acclaim for its sensible and impressive features. The extensions concept allows any kind of plugins to be used.
Mono6
This is an open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET platform. It allows .NET applications to be created and run on GNU/Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Mac OS and many other platforms as well.
Apache web server7
This is the popular open source web server. In fact, it is the most popular web server on the planet! It runs nearly more than half of the websites out there. Yes, that’s right - Apache handles more websites than all the competition (including Microsoft IIS) combined.
VLC Player8
This is a video player that can play anything from DivX to MP3 to Ogg to VCDs and DVDs to … who says open source ain’t fun? ;-)
This list is just intended to give you a brief idea - there are many more excellent FLOSS out there, such as the Perl language, PHP language, Drupal content management system for websites, PostgreSQL database server, TORCS racing game, KDevelop IDE, Xine - the movie player, VIM editor, Quanta+ editor, Banshee audio player, GIMP image editing program, … This list could go on forever.
To get the latest buzz in the FLOSS world, check out the following websites:
• OMG! Ubuntu!9
• Web Upd810
• DistroWatch11
• Planet Debian12
Visit the following websites for more information on FLOSS:
5 http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox
Appendix: FLOSS
• GitHub Explore13
• Code Triage14
• SourceForge15
• FreshMeat16
So, go ahead and explore the vast, free and open world of FLOSS!
13 http://github.com/explore 14 http://www.codetriage.com/
15 http://www.sourceforge.net 16 http://www.freshmeat.net
Appendix: Colophon
Almost all of the software that I have used in the creation of this book are FLOSS.
1. Birth of the Book
In the first draft of this book, I had used Red Hat 9.0 Linux as the foundation of my setup and in the sixth draft, I used Fedora Core 3 Linux as the basis of my setup.
Initially, I was using KWord to write the book (as explained in the history lesson in the preface).
2. Teenage Years
Later, I switched to DocBook XML using Kate but I found it too tedious. So, I switched to OpenOffice which was just excellent with the level of control it provided for formatting as well as the PDF generation, but it produced very sloppy HTML from the document.
Finally, I discovered XEmacs and I rewrote the book from scratch in DocBook XML (again) after I decided that this format was the long term solution.
In the sixth draft, I decided to use Quanta+ to do all the editing. The standard XSL stylesheets that came with Fedora Core 3 Linux were being used. However, I had written a CSS document to give color and style to the HTML pages. I had also written a crude lexical analyzer, in Python of course, which automatically provides syntax highlighting to all the program listings.
For the seventh draft, I’m using MediaWiki17 as the basis of my setup. I used to edit everything online and the readers can directly read/edit/discuss within the wiki website, but I ended up spending more time fighting spam than writing.
For the eight draft, I used Vim18, Pandoc19, and Mac OS X.
17 http://www.mediawiki.org
18 http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/vim
19 http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html
Appendix: Colophon
3. Now
For the ninth draft, I switched to AsciiDoc format20 and used Emacs 24.321, tomorrow theme22, Fira Mono font23 and adoc-mode24 to write.
4. About the Author
See http://swaroopch.com/about/
20 http://asciidoctor.org/docs/what-is-asciidoc/
21 http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2013/03/11/whats-new-emacs-24-3/
22 https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme
23 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/styleguide/products/firefox-os/typeface/#download-primary 24 https://github.com/sensorflo/adoc-mode/wiki