Hackers and the 'Open Source' project

 

Definition of 'Hacker' :

  1. Person who tries to intrude into computer networks to get personal data or just shoot a website down. These people mostly do this to feel powerful.
  2. Programmer; named so because of hacking his keyboard extremely fast.

My text is about the hackers described in the second definition. Most of these hackers have their roots in the flower-power generation of the 70s. Their paradigm is:

"Information should be free to everybody , only private information is to be protected"

Matching to this, they think big software companies are wrong by taking money for software, because ,in a wide definition, software is information, too. Influenced by this, hackers , like Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, started to program their own software and even operating systems.

More and more people from all over the world began to work together on these projects. For example millions of people work on Linux, an operating system first developed by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student who was sick of the existing operation systems and decided to write an own one. So Linux is 'The biggest common project in the world'.

Nearly all of this software is available in the internet for free. You can download it and do what you want to do with it, for example change or even sell it, if you make your changes public to others, too. Additional to this you should support the development of the software in any way. You may help by programming further features or search failures in the code, called 'bugs'. If you are not a programmer, you can write documentations for the programs, translate these into your mother tongue, or donate money to the project, because most of the developers are students, who are not able to buy expensive computer hardware.

The licensing terms are summed up in the General Public License, called GPL.

This license may be download at the website of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project.

Mathias Richerzhage

Sources:

 

The Irc Network - The biggest chat-community worldwide

The Irc is an international computer programme for unlimited internet chatting around the whole world. Jarrko Oikarinen founded the Irc (Irc stands for "Internet Relay Chat") in the year 1988 to chat with his mates online at a Finnish university campus. He developed the whole protocol of the Irc till 1990 when Michael Andraf released a new enhanced version of the Irc based on the UNIX-operation system, which got completed with a Windows-version some years later.

The Irc network works with a Client / Server - principle, that means that the message from "client A" gets routed from the server to the receiver "client B". Today more than 3000 different servers supply about 1 million chatters from all countries and continents .The biggest server named by the famous computer game "Quakenet" provides 40.000 chatting people 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

To manage this high count of chatters there are several administrators who take for the security, the technical equipment, the freedom of opinion and the linguistic usage. In order to avoid that all people have to chat in one chat room, every chatter can build his / her own channel (the channel name begins with a rhomb - e.g. programming) for private chatting with his / her friends. He is also allowed to manage the access of unknown people to his channel and to change his nickname. As a result of the feeling as a chat community there are lots of public channels for a wide range of topics but there are also local-bound channels like Berlin or Krefeld.

The main language which the bulk of the chatters use to talk is expectedly English, but that does not stand for a barrier of the development of a multilingual internet chat subculture which is infiltrated by innumerable cultural differences and ways of thinking. In use of the chat it is getting easier to forge social links to people in other countries and different situations of living, especially for youngsters. The Irc network gives them the space to develop an own multicultural attitude without knowing the roots of the culture in real life. An adjustment of the linguistic usage through the progression of shortcuts and anglicims is already visible. Furthermore the anonymity in the chat rooms is an advantage which is appreciated by the chatters because they can show their opinion to other people without facing the problems of disregards and racism caused by special ideologies of appearance and origin.

By Cem Koyun