The World Goes Open Source

As the days in NIT Rourkela’s spring semester roll on, engulfed in the thrill-a-minute ride of tech fest and spring fest, we rarely get the time to think and retrospect about the days that fly so fast.

We rarely keep in touch with the advancement of technology, especially the field of computing that takes rapid strides. The past month has seen quite a few breathtaking events in the computing world.

The open-source movement continues its momentum and is pushing hard for its share in the computing world. The last few months have shown some great prospects. Firstly, the Intrepid Ibex release of Ubuntu allowed installing Linux on an NTFS file system as a program inside Windows, making it a lucrative option for people who have so far not installed Linux for the sole reason of having to reformat a hard disk with ext2/ext3.

Secondly, another open-source project, KDE, has made its foothold stronger in Windows with its stable release for Windows. Now Windows has direct open-source desktop competition inside it.

Next up in open source is Britannica, who have now allowed users to edit materials on their encyclopedia due to growing competition from Wikipedia.

The hardware industry saw a great milestone as AMD’s Phenom II became the first quad-core processor to break into the 6.5 GHz domain in extreme performance testing, making it the fastest processor on earth at the time.

On the other end of the software industry, Microsoft Windows 7 beta has evoked an unprecedented response, with downloads reaching record numbers.

The next few weeks are going to be really exciting in the computing world, and we wait as the next generation of computing unfolds right in front of our eyes.