Week 7: Lecture

I did not attend this week’s lecture as I was sick. I’m sure my presence was missed. Reading over the lecture notes it seemed like a good and interesting topic that I missed. Topic discussed in this lecture was creative commons and open source software.

Creative commons is a non-for profit organisation, which works on the basis of “some rights reserved” instead of “all rights reserved”. Using this systems means that creators of a program can choose licensing options for their programs such as non-commercial, no derivatives and ShareAlike. This means that others are still allowed to use your program and modify it but with only some restrictions instead of having all the normal restrictions which are usually placed on people.

The next topic being discussed was open source software. I love open source software. I bought my new Mac this year for around $1600 and on top of that I also bought Microsoft Office for it for $200 not realising that there are awesome programs such as OpenOffice that you can get for FREE instead of wasting your money. You can say I’m a little bit peeved that this class wasn’t held at the beginning of the year. I guess I’ve learnt my lesson now. Out of the other programs that were mentioned in the lecture slides such as Firefox, Linux, VLC I’d only heard of Firefox, which I’ve actually been using for a few years now. I prefer it to Internet Explorer and even Safari. Don’t know why but just seems a lot easier to use then the other two.

There was a homework challenge to download an open source software program and use it for 10 days. I downloaded GIMP but have no idea how to use it. I will also download OpenOffice and see how I go with that. Like I already mentioned I already have Firefox and love it so I guess I’ve kind of completed the challenge already even if I did cheat a little. Keep an eye out to see how I go with GIMP.