Hello again people !!
Hey, this article is a nostalgic one. This means that today we are gonna talk about the entire FSF and l’espirit of the movement.
Let’s begin with a simple thought-experiment. Imagine driving a car, that you really really love and rely upon and which has served you quite well thus far. Now, you are on a road-trip {aren’t you and adventurous one;) } and sadly, one of the tyres went pufff i.e. flat.
Obviously, you are quite far-sighted and smart so the solution is a simple one, you have another spare tyre with you, you only need to change the tyre and ride on ahead. Can you imagine a person who does not know how to replace a flat tyre !! Well, to say the least this person would most probably come across as an incompetent one or in case it’s your lucky day then it’s a “Damsel In Distress” but if it’s one of your bad days then it’s “ The hills have eyes “=)
Now, in another scenario something more expected has happened and though you understand even the slightest cringe of your car, you are not able to fix it and you are stuck. You open the hood but there’s hardly anything at all that seems familiar to you, in fact of all things, if it’s the first time you open up that hood you might be surprised how many things are there in the hood. So, you are stuck, your beloved car is apparently dead and your phone’s battery is down.
You wait and you wait, watch so many cars pass by without a glance at you. You are beginning to curse out loud. Luckily, the next thing that you see coming towards you is the car-repair service vehicle and you conveniently have the problem fixed. But sadly, by that time you have already missed that important meeting/ picking someone up from the airport etc and have almost ruined that once in a lifetime opportunity of making a good first impression or your hotel reservation was cancelled.
So, you are angry, to say the least. But then, as smart as you are, you notice that the repairman didn’t really open up any of those parts in the hood but instead he only poured some cold water in the coolant-box and the car came back to life. Now, you are really wondering that if it was so simple and you had plenty of water for the trip, you could have done it yourself and get yourself moving. You resolve to learn a bit more about those parts which are under the hood of your car as you realize that merely driving a car is not enough but you must also understand it a bit, at least to the extent that you can take care of such small problems yourself.
Hey, I know that this is a slight detour but there is an important lesson in this story. You can’t really rely even upon the best vehicle if you don’t have the slightest idea of how it works.
See, the same idea and the same ideal inspired the Free Software Movement. The thing is the user must be free so as to look under the hood. And in terms of computer lingo, it means the source code. I am gonna write more about these terms later on but let’s stick to theWhy’s rather than the How’s for the moment !!
Now, it is the same with the computers only at a much much grander scale. After all the single greatest tool that mankind ever created is the reason you call yourself modern. Computers, if they were a living species then it is not an exaggeration to say that these computer would have already outclassed human beings, be it on the basis of the quantity or on the basis of the rate of evolution. It took milleniums for man to stand on two legs and only decades for a computer to do so !!
But fortunately, they are not alive and depending upon our usage of these computers they can be the greatest ever instrument of freedom or the strongest menacle/chain that human mind could have possibly perceived of. So, the question is which one are they !!
Now, I think it is the right moment to elaborate upon today’s headline.
rms, as I have told you previously also, is Richard M. Stallman’s handle or say pet-name.
Before moving forward I would like you to visit this wiki page about him and notice the fact that the for a guy who studied in expensive universities like Harvard and MIT, the guy has an awesome lot of “free” mentioned in his life.
And if that gives you some idea about the legendary status of the personality then listen to his talk at the TED platform.
So I hope, in fact I strongly insist that you visit the two pages else...
Ahem ahem, with that little detail out of the way. Let’s move on.=)
So, would you rather that this wonderful tool, that’s there in your hand, inside your watch and this instrument that surrounds you more and more every day and makes itself an all the more integral part of your life stay unknown to you.
Why not befriend this strange beast ?? And trust me the journey begins from coding. Oh, those weird lines seem too hard. Trust me, that’s not a problem.
Did you know that Black Eyed Peas famed wIll.i.am and the NBA star Chris Bosh code as well !!
And as I am super excited about Coding these days, I would like to share it with you :-
So, I think it’s time to start coding and coding doesn’t have to mean all those matrix-movie like 0’s and 1’s but just thinking logically and there is absolutely nothing that should stop you from getting inspired and started at Code.org !!
Hey, next time we are gonna get started with the tech-lingo !!
Till next time,
Himanshu Sharma
Wishing you a happy coding=)
No comments:
Post a Comment