Merge

Calling software "free" can mean two things:

• Free as in beer (i.e., you don't have to pay for it)
• Free as in speech (i.e., you can do whatever you want with it)

Once upon a time, most software was neither of those. Now, a lot of apps are both.

Let's take a classic example: Windows vs. Linux. We all know about Windows and Microsoft. Windows is an operating system created by the talented programmers at Microsoft. Windows is not Open Source, meaning when you buy (see #1 above) Windows, you're buying "computer code" which is the result of putting the original code written by those programmers through a "compiler" which converts it into ones and zeros (see #2 above).

Why is this bad? Here are a few reasons:

• It costs money. Money that comes out of your wallet.
• It relies on a company. If Microsoft goes under, then Windows will no longer be supported.
• It belongs to a company. Any bug fixes or new features must come through that company, so if they say no, then too bad.
• That company has to protect itself, so if someone comes up with a feature or app that is great for the user but bad for the company, then too bad.
• The fact that you just get ones and zeros instead of the source code means that you can't even modify your own copy if it. It would be like sending someone an image of a Word Document and then telling them to fix the typo. You can't really do it unless you either have the original document or you have the time and energy to start from scratch.
• It's written by a bunch of people doing it for money, not for passion, so code quality can be a concern.

And then there's Linux. Linux is an operating system (just like Windows) written by thousands of interested programmers all throughout the world because they love doing it. Most of them aren't getting paid, and they do this in their spare time.

Why is this good?

• It's free as in beer. It costs nothing. Weeeeeeee!
• It's not connected to a company. It will continue to thrive beyond any company's lifetime as long as people are interested in it.
• It belongs to its users, so any person at any time is free to modify it, fork it (i.e., create a new version of it), fix a bug in it, etc. As such, development is very fast and constantly on the cutting edge.
• There are no barriers (like a company's cash flow) to any new features. If people want it, then it will be added.
• It's written by people doing it for fun. These are the kinds of people that will read through old code, looking for ways to improve it or fixing possible bugs, just for the heck of it.
• Its source code is looked at by thousands of people. A bug or an inefficient algorithm which may go unnoticed by a few developers at a company will not go unnoticed by this horde of curious coders.

Open Source software like Linux is extremely popular (which may be a surprise), especially on the web. Linux powers the vast majority of web servers. Open source content management systems like Drupal and Wordpress are extremely popular. Many programming languages (including PHP and Python) are Open Source, along with many respective frameworks (like jQuery and Django). At this point, it's safe to say that Open Source powers the web.

And it really can't be any other way. The web is a constantly evolving platform, with new tools being created daily (literally) by programmers worldwide. It's only right that its infrastructure should belong to these programmers, and it's the only feasible way that the infrastructure can keep up with the staggering development rate of the tools.

So what does Merge do about this? Well, a lot. We use Linux servers running Apache (an Open Source server suite), we browse using Firefox (an Open Source browser), we build most websites on Drupal or CakePHP (an Open Source CMS and PHP framework, respectively), and we make interactive features using jQuery (an Open Source framework for JavaScript). We release any code created here that the general public of programmers might find useful under an open source license. We submit patches and bug reports to many of the above projects. We help where we can.

Bottom line: Open Source software makes sense and it's here to stay, and Merge is right there with it.