What does it mean to choose open source?

Is open source software a business model, a philosophy or is it simply one more way to write software? Well, its all of these things but all too often open source gets split off into one of these three categories. Editorial contributor Monty Manley submited the following editorial to osViews which explains that open source software is simply what you make of it. No more. No less. I know perhaps twenty-five or thirty programmers personally; I'd count eight of them as friends. They are all programmers like myself: corporate IT folks whose daily lives are spent producing in-house apps. All of us use Windows NT as a development platform; the lingua franca is either Visual Basic or some variant of C++ (although Java is becoming more popular).

But of all of us, I am the only one actively developing under Linux (on my own time, of course). I have long been a user of Linux -- I first started using Slackware in 1994, switched to Debian in 1996 -- but only recently began to do serious Linux programming. My toolkit of choice is GTK+, and my language is straight C. I use Glade as a GUI-builder and XEmacs as my editor.

My programmer friends are puzzled by my new fervor. "Why are you doing this?" one friend (I'll call him Joe) asked me the other day. "Linux is about 10 light-years behind Windows. Besides, it could be a CLM for you." (N.B.: CLM is short for "career-limiting move" and is generally used when referring to any decision not approved by management.) Joe, in contrast, was in the middle of getting his MCSE certification and was teaching Visual Basic classes at the local community college. He was honestly concerned that I was derailing my career.

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