Crowdsource, Open Source

The spirit of Ubuntu is a humanist South African philosophy that places the needs of the community above the needs of the individual. This is the name given to the open source software pioneered by South African Mark Shuttleworth. If the individual in this case is the Windows Corporation, then the community would be computer users around the world.

So what are the needs of the community? To have a software system that is free and allows all computer users the ability to download, copy, distribute and improve their software regardless of their language or disability. This is the idea behind the development of the Linux open source software package Ubuntu.

This spirit behind the name was illustrated recently at the Google headquarters in California. A passionate community of literally hundreds of software developers met to voluntarily put their grey matter together for the continuous development and improvement of the Ubuntu open source software.

The future looks bright as many workers and home computer users have already adopted the software in the US. Europe has also cottoned on as more recently the French National Assembly has abandoned Microsoft in place of Ubuntu. There is also the belief that this will lead to more job creation as local companies will be needed to install and service Linux software used by businesses.

Harnessing the bright minds of the general public to develop the best possible ideas is beneficial in both Crowdsourcing and Open Source technology. Although Crowdsourcing like Idea bounty is a top-down approach where the activity is initiated by the client and undertaken by individuals - and bottom-up Open Source activities are initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public - the principle philosophy behind the two remain the same. Namely;  “two minds are better than one” or rather many minds are better than the stodgy cluttered old minds of monopolistic corporations.