Ben's Second Post

After surfing the blogosphere for blogs of interest for quite some time, I came across a blog entitled Open Culture, one dedicated to the “open source culture.” It was made through Blogger, and as of April 25th had actually been shut down and continued on another website (it now had its own domain, and was renamed Fast Wonder).

Ever since I discovered and researched BitTorrent, I have become very interested in open source in general (when I go home next, I will test out UBUNTU--an open source operating system--for the first time on my PC). I downloaded many of the programs off of Software for Starving Students, and use them often. Needless to say, when I discovered Fast Wonder, I was pretty excited.

After I read some of the posts, I began checking out the Fast Wonder blogroll and was surprised to come across Lawrence Lessig's blog. I read that too for awhile, but eventually returned to Fast Wonder.

The reason I am so interested in open source is because I believe it is what the internet is all about, and was what the internet was all about, before businesses began to take things over. In its earliest days, only people fluent in HTML were able to use it, and I am pretty sure those who were fluent would work together and keep each other informed about problems or new codes that were being used. This general attitude of sharing with one another to improve the overall internet experience lost its importance when businesses and governments entered cyberspace and began their efforts to control content.

I believe it is very important that we return to this once-common attitude, and familiarizing oneself with and using open source programs are clearly great ways to create such a change. In my opinion, if someone wants to share something they own with someone else, they should be able to. The idea that sharing something--a song, for example--through a program like BitTorrent is “wrong” was created by businesses motivated only by their unquenchable desire for profit. My hope is that more and more people will come across blogs like Fast Wonder, as I have, become aware of the untapped benefits the internet has to offer, and work to make the internet everything it can be.