MenZa’s Weblog

A lot of people have written articles on open source applications–about how open source lets people modify other people’s software and how it encourages freedom in computing.

However, I’ve never seen any proper and comprehensive article (this article won’t be either, but I’ll try to do as much as I can in 10 minutes) with the subject of how open source software promotes forming of good communities willing to help and offer support to others who use it.

That is, in my opinion, one of the biggest advantages of open source software.

Let me present you an example: most people who’ve been online for more than 2 weeks know about Microsoft Office aswell as OpenOffice.org.

I don’t know of any Office communities–however, I do know that there is a large userbase on the OpenOffice.org forums–aswell as their IRC channel.

It’s the same with most Linux distributions.
I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for quite some time now but frankly; I don’t think I could’ve done it without help from the many people in the forums or their many, many IRC channels.

To bring out another example: Gentoo is probably one of the most widely-used Linux distributions out there. I just looked at their IRC channel–930 people.
An astounding 930 people.

Open source software builds communities. Not only with Linux is this the case, but also WordPress, SimplePie and a ton of other projects.

Sure, some communities are better than others, but that’s an impossible task to solve.