The beautiful thing about open source is the ability to look at the source files. The ugly thing is that I don’t really care to. As I have progressed through the Computer Science program at Brigham Young University, I have come to realize this simple fact: I don’t want to be a programmer. I find myself with little motivation to read other people’s code and try to make improvements on it. This is probably why I am trying to switch my major from Computer Science to Information Systems; although I’ll still get a CS minor since I have done so many classes. There are many who swear by open source software, and they prefer open source over their commercial equivalent. Such an example is Sun’s Open Office (open source) vs. Microsoft’s Office (closed source) for office productivity software, or The Gimp (open source) vs. Adobe Photoshop (closed source) for graphics editing. In most cases, I find the open source software to be usable, but less user friendly, slower and sometimes downright ugly. I am not bashing all open source products by any means, I use Linux based web servers running Apache and PHP–all of which are open source applications. I just think that commercial (usually closed source) applications have their perks as well. In conclusion, despite my love of computing and my knowledge of programming, I don’t think open source is the solution to all things. To me, open source is to socialism while closed source is to capitalism.

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