Week 11: Hipsters for Handouts

As a college student, there are two words that strike a chord above all others: "free" and "fair trade." If there's one thing that the youth of today enjoy, it's taking advantage of projects made by others with the intent to share without the burden of corporate backing. Open source software is the equivalent of going to an independent coffee shop or eating organically grown tomatoes, but for the Internet.

This week's examples of open source software included Open Office, a free comparable version of Microsoft Office programs and SourceForge, a database for open source projects circulating throughout the web. From a journalistic perspective, some of the most useful online apparatuses stem from open source software. For example, the popular browser Firefox is open source and is used by about one-third of Internet surfers, and is especially popular among the younger, web-savvy crowd. FTP programs such as FireFTP are only available for Firefox and, more often than not, the browser displays XHTML and CSS more accurately than popular default browsers like Internet Explorer in Windows and Safari in the Mac OS.

Osalt is similar to SourceForge in that it provides information about open source alternatives to corporate programs such as iTunes and Movie Maker.


Sara Solano is trying to breed actual firefoxes.