open-source software development is like cooking. Let me explain.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you want to make an apple pie from scratch. You’ll need a recipe for the pie, that’s certainly easy to find, there are tons of pie recipes in one of the many cook books you own. Just find the apple pie recipe you like the most and set it on the counter.
Next you’ll need the dishes and utensils to manage all the ingredients you’ll have. You probably have a nice size bowl, and rolling pin, a wooden spoon, and a pie pan, but if not, I bet your neighbor has some, or your friend down the road. If not, then you can go to the store and buy the dishes and utensils.
Okay, now your ready to gather all the ingredients, which, if you don’t have yourself, you could borrow from a neighbor or friend, or buy them from the convenience store. Now comes the fun part, mixing all your ingredients together. Your following the recipe when, about halfway through the process, you decide to vary the recipe a bit. You put an extra block of butter in, a little more sugar then it calls for, and you mix some ground cinnamon into the dough. Why not right?
After forming something out of nothing, you stick it in your oven, set the timer, and wait. Images of gooey apple filling, and crisp, buttery, cinnamon crust float around in your head. You can smell the sweet concoction of cinnamon and apple in the air as it bakes into perfection.
When it’s done, you invite some friends over to share the pie, your excited when you tell them how you made it and you give them each a copy of your new recipe, which you derived from some strangers recipe. Your friends enjoy the pie and many of them want to make it for themselves, and some of them even said they would try vanilla instead of cinnamon in the crust.
You made this pie from scratch, you know exactly what its made from, so you know its perfectly safe to eat, and you know it tastes better than those store bought pies, and you like to think you improved upon the recipe you worked from.
developing software is the same way, and when you’re working with open-source tools or deriving your work from another open-source project, you can look at the source so that you know exactly what your working with, and just like making an apple pie, there is nothing stopping you from changing it up a bit (or completely). All the tools you need are there, for free, and when you finish the project, you are free to do with it anything you want.
Let’s say I want to download the source code for Ubuntu Linux. I could either go to archive.ubuntu.com and find what I need, or download the source from Synaptic or the terminal. It’s all there, I can customize it ’till my heart’s content.
This simile is the same when it comes to using open-source software. The cleanest and safest (though not the easiest) way to install an application is to compile it from the source code. Just download all the source (its usually packaged nicely in a .tar archive), and run a few commands from the terminal. Installing it this way, you can specify where to put the installation files, so that you know where all components of the program are, plus you have all the source code in a nice archive. You made this pie from scratch, you know exactly what its made from, so you know its perfectly safe to eat.
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Tags: cooking, development, open-source, pie, simile, software
