I <3 OSS

I love open source software. Free software is nice, but OSS really takes the cake.

Since I started here at iMarc I have had a lot more exposure to open source software than ever before. Mostly this is due to the fact that our servers run on 100% open source software. Currentlly all of our production web servers run FreeBSD (4.x and 5.x ) for their OS, along with Apache, MySQL and PHP. We also run a file server on Fedora Core 4, set up with Samba shares that all of our Windows and OSX boxes connect to.

But, back to my original point. I love OSS. We host a search engine web service called SiftBox. This is based on Mnogosearch, an open source search engine available at http://search.mnogo.ru. Mnogosearch is a fairly evolved search engine with quite a few features which made it our strongest candidate to use for our search engine web service. We did, however, find an issue with the software in that searches that contained phrases were not properly highlighted in the results. The beauty of open source software is that we were able to modify the source code to fix the issue.

On a recent personal project I also experienced the joy of working with OSS. This summer I decided to build my own PVR (Personal Video Recorder). I chose MythTV for the software package, and set up Fedora Core 4 for the operating system. Throughout the process I was able to customize the software to make it so my PVR works exactly how I want it to.

I have benefited amazingly from the effort of countless others by using open source software, but in return I have also tried to give back to the community. iMarc submitted a patch back to Mnogosearch to fix the phrase highlighting issue, and I have been working on setting up a site to help share information about my experiences setting up MythTV. I also frequent the MythTV mailing lists trying to help other out as I can. Don't get me wrong, closed source software companies offer some good products (check out PHPEd), they just don't make me all warm and fuzzy inside like OSS.