Reading 2: The Medium is the Massage - Marshall McLuhan's

Very thought provoking literature. political, artistic, poetic. It's one to be read several times to get the bigger picture of which I doing now. I believe Louise commented about the book in the class today. It doesn't take a long time to read or flick through but instead makes you want to visualize the way the words and images make you think or at least that's what I took from the book.

It's amazing to think how things go round and become relevant several decades later, as with this book which was first published in 1967. This was at the time when the internet was in its infancy and the foresight of the exchange of information was spot on. Now that most things can be digitized, rich media content can only thrive.

Reading 1: First Post - Open Source

Hi to you all and I'd like to start by apologizing for the delay in posting my views on the chapter of which I have read. The chosen book was Free as in Freedom - chapter 11 Open source .

This chapter describes the members and organizations involved with the development of open source and gives an account of how the name came about. Open Source software now has a following of millions worldwide and have become a great alternative to proprietary software and is freely available across the web. The focus of this chapter is on the pioneers which established this model. The author describes the events leading to the conference and gives snip bits of the tension between some of the candidates attending, it is written in a way of the events unfolding .

After reading this chapter I found the need to research some of the people of whom the author was describing. Linus Torvalds was the one of these characters and had be a major contributor to the development of the Linux kernel (Operating System). Linus Tolvalds features heavily within this chapter and by all accounts was a young quick thinking , witty individual. I found an interesting video called The origins of Linux on Youtube for those that are interested in that subject. There is also more information available at http://www.gnu.org/. The video titled Freedom Fry is worth a look as he manages to describe the whole movement of the open source community with a humoured passion and non technical manner.