You Say WordPress, I Say Open Source!!!
In a recent research on the – Influence of Open Source made by Kabatology for the University of Bologna(Unibo) Italy, Kanute (aka Martin Kaba) pointed out how Open source has revolutionized the software business in general by dramatically lowering the cost of entry for software providers. Development tools and infrastructure components required to deliver software as a service are now inexpensive or free. This has opened the software market to a much wider audience of developers who can now start companies and deliver their products for far less money than was required just a few years ago. In short, open source is making software cheaper in that it lowers barriers to entry and creates a more competitive market.
In a case study Kabatology looked on how Open Source has and is helping the Blogsphere.
An estimated 120,000 Weblogs are created a day, and a great majority of Webloggers prefer Open Source blog software
Let’s ask ourselves a few questions.
- How easy is it today to create a blog?
- How many of us use Open Source Blogging Software?
- What Open Source Blogging Software do you use?
You say WordPress, I say Open Source. The WordPress full version is one of the preferred software by bloggers. For whosoeverdidn’t take note on the WordPress/About page it is clearly stated – Everything you see here, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cats home page to a Fortune 5 web site without paying anyone a license fee.
Further down the page they say “WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on and MySQL and licensed under the GPL For those who are not so much into programming, these two products are leaders in their field.
Php is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic Web pages. You create pages with PHP and HTML. When a visitor opens the page, the server processes the PHP commands and then sends the results to the visitor’s browser, just as with ASP(Microsoft) or ColdFusion(Macromedia). Unlike ASP or ColdFusion, however, PHP is Open Source and cross-platform. PHP runs both on Windows and Unix versions.
To retrieve information from a database, you first need to have a database. That’s where MySQL comes in. MySQL is an open-source high-performance, multi-threaded, multi-user relational database management system (RDBMS) built around a client-server architecture. It was designed specifically for speed and stability and has become one of the most popular RDBMS for database-driven Web applications, both on and off the Web. Today, more than 10 million web sites create, use, and deploy MySQL-based applications; that number rises daily. Needless to say these two Open Source programs(Mysql and Php),together with
Apache,The most widely available HTTP web server on the Internet. It supports the PERL and PHP languages (the backbone of many database systems you’ll find on the web and the IT industry today). Naturally Kabatology uses Mysql as database and runs on Apache.Try to create a simple Web Hosting platform at home with these software and have fun!!!
My last question, probably, would be;
How many of you out there have written PlugIns, Themes or Templates for WordPress?
From AntiSpams to Techorati Plugins, from -MyblogLog to YouTube PlugIns for WordPress. The list would be very long. If you have a new Plugin you would like to share let us know.
This is what I’m talking about, there is enough space for each one of Us, we are all part of Open Source.
This is just an extract of the research. The complete version belongs to the University of Bologna