Happily Married

After courting my girlfriend for more than a decade we finally got married on 28th November, 2004. I was really fortunate to marry my childhood sweetheart and always thank God for not being unfair with me.

Salute to the OpenSource Community

OpenSource buzzword is a phenomenon of the yesteryears, has been in existence since the early ages of software development till 1965 when IBM ceased bundling their source code with the operating system of their computers. In 1969 Ken Thompson wrote the first version of Unix and distributed the source code freely throughout the 70's. The extra-ordinary effort of a young student at the University of Helsinki:Linus Torvalds along with lot of other computer engineers and mathematicians paved the way to a great operating system "Linux".Engineers all around the world(aka "The opensource community")created their own flavours of Linux as the source code was freely available.That created versions like Susie,RedHat( a renowned company),Debian etc. University of California, Berkley started a project which gave rise to a BSD( Berkeley Software Distribution) Kernel used by Macintosh operating system.

Source Code is no longer a proprietory concept.The developer community all across the globe contributes and uses the source code, subsequently tweaking the code according to their needs thereby giving rise to a new version or flavour.The cycle goes on forever. This can only happen as the source code is freely downloadable.

The concept of freely distributable source code has been a bane and an idea of consternation to monopolist behemoths like Microsoft. The opensource community is infact bigger than anything even Microsoft could afford and the software development model behind it is more effective than the conventional closed-source proprietory model.Today the strongest competitor to Microsoft is Linux and the challenge posed by Linux pre-empted Microsoft to postpone the shipping of their latest OS "LongHorn"..Horns are getting shorter....

With projects like Apache and sourceforge its been a juggernaut for the OpenSource Community. We are on a constant roll. I have always been an ardent exponent of freewares and opensource and it gives me great satisfaction to proclaim that I can develop a fully functional web-application without purchasing any proprietary softwares. Speaking from a java world with free web-frameworks like Struts,Tapestry,Hivemind,JSF,Spring: Application Servers like JBoss: Web Containers like Tomcat:Data Access Frameworks like OJB and Hibernate:Databases like MySQL and PostGRE SQL one can do wonders.

I thereby solicit all the developers in the planet WORLD to contribute more towards OpenSource and reduce the monopoly of companies like Microsoft and strengthen the OpenSource brotherhood.