Yesterday i was IRC’ing with my fellow hacker and since not much work was there , the talks shifted to the philosophy of Free software and its new comfortable avtar ie, Opensource.

The best thing about what we agreed about all that exist in the Opensource domain is that nobody owns the code or the software .Its just a whole community of like minded people who deliver every six months ,the most viable,secure ,powerful desktop,Servers without fail. The most astonishing thing is that nobody has to be commited towards developing opensource.Every single bit of software has been written by hackers who simply enjoy coding in their leisure time.Yet softwares are so professional and so widely used.

I asked the guy who has been in this project for a couple of years and works with cisco. “why are you working on this project so much , not your company supports this , you dont earn anything , why do u contribute to this “. He said its giving back time . and i realised its true.
Almost all of us hail from middle class families, families which couldnt really afford a computer .I bought my first pc only when i entered second year in my college.While you see many people rush up to computers much earlier ,my little cousin in chennai uses a computer to make custom labels for his notebook at the age of 8 .

While we had to match every other soul in college ,the desire to actually bring out our dreams needed much steeper growth rate.That was possible from coming in to this community .No matter how many books on programming you could get your hands on,but there is nothing like you have this problem and there is a guy who has seen this problem earlier and solved it in 4 days ,but your work now consists of just this.Login in to a channel on IRC ping someone sating you have this problem and in minutes u get a reply from the guy who has seen this and it took less than 10 min for you !.So fast isnt it ?

But since whole of this Opensource works on sharing and leisure time,not always the people who started this project be available to consult,their organistaion(workin) may not let them free now , so the guys who have been working with these people all the while take over and the project just continues .
The guys who started out as beginers like me will one day come up to mentors and help many more people become mentors .This way there is a faster growth of not just people .the softwares too get better when there are more and more better people hacking in to it .

This applies to so many things today in our day today lives. Not always Gandhi existed ,not always Dr. Kalam is going to exist but what they have done is to open up their minds to the next generation and help create many more of them ,probably even better .
If we aspire to be called a superpower ,we certainly cant do it on the left overs of people from bygone era ,we have to build ourselves on them .
I remember reading a quote from Newton If i have been able to see farther in life its only because i have stood on the shoulders of giants .So true ! if i have been able to step on to become a engineer only because my father could get to some college and realise the worth of an engineer.

Now why am i saying all this here ?
All of us have shared this place havent we ? we have put down our thoughts . some humorous ,some sad ,some make us think ,some timepass .but we could do more ?
Remember what Archie behen and uday could contribute when thamarai was hospitalised . I felt really happy when they helped him in his surgery and when his friend called me up in the middle of night after the operation saying thamarai is safe and wil lbe in recovery from now .
His pics can be found here
http://atulalex.googlepages.com/updates
http://atulalex.googlepages.com/helpthamarai.

I think apart from having fun at WOW ! we could help the couple do more ? may be canbring in money .I keep hearing lotsa revenues generated through blogs .
Uday i guess might have more knowledge on these .

From a small venture that this generous couple have started we could help them make this better !I guess with so many nice and knowledgable people coming in we could grow this WOW ! beyond archie and uday .

What say ?

Although i give no route on how we should go . I wish someone could bring about one . discuss it junta