Why I love open source

I was reminded of the beauty of open source today, when I helped my brother to do something fun on his Ubuntu PC.

My brother is a mechanic and an all-round handyman.  If there's a physical object or machine, he can usually fix it; if he can't, he can at least point out what needs to be done.  His world of objects is malleable, which gives him an aura of usefulness that any man would be proud to have.

When it comes to computers, my brother is not proficient enough to fine tune his computer as he does his car, but the freedom to tailor the system to his needs that a GNU/Linux OS offers appeals to him.

Today he had a problem: he wanted to save online videos to his desktop.  Sure, there are programs that do that -- some of them even with a user interface -- and of course there is youtube-dl, but if you've already watched the video it is in a cache folder somewhere.  I poked around online, found a BASH script that dumps the videos from cache in to the home folder, and then used an SVG from the /usr/share folder to make him a pretty desktop icon.

But he really wanted the videos to be saved in a date-stamped folder.  So I added a couple lines.

Then it occurred to me that a visual confirmation and a sound would be in order: enter xcowsay and mplayer.

Then he asked to change the image, which we did, but before using it I edited it in GIMP to make its background transparent, so that it would fit in wherever it popped up on his desktop.

Then he decided he wanted a sound from one of the videos he had downloaded, so I used Soundconverter to extract the audio from the video, and then Audacity to trim the audio to the particular sound effect he wanted.

It didn't take very long and it was great fun to create something funny and useful right before his eyes.  He got his own software developer for about half an hour and I got to perform some command-line magic.  Now he can say that he has his very own video-saving software, written especially for him by his brother.  (Released under GPLv3 of course)

When Richard Stallman says that proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless, I believe he means at least in part that it denies users the opportunity to help each other solve problems and share their solutions with the rest of the world.  In this case it was a simple problem, and thanks to open source its solution was fun and educative.

Alexander Garber
Director
Clockwork PC

Open Source IT Solutions