Cars and Open Source Software
I’ve always liked customization, especially in cars. In my eyes, it is one of the best things that you can do. You can make your car look, feel, smell, and even drive the way you want it to. You can actually modify every aspect of your vehicle if you are willing to put in the time and effort. This is very much like open source software. If you see a way that you can make it better, you can go into it and redo, tweak, or modify the entire thing, and if there is something that you want that doesn’t yet exist, you can make it. Now, imagine if you were not able to do this. That is what proprietary software is.
It is like buying a car that has its hood welded shut that explodes whenever you try to add something new to it that isn’t approved or installed by the manufacturer. If I didn’t have the freedom to put in things like superchargers, turbochargers, cold air intakes, forced cowl induction, led lighting system, GPS, and other stuff, I would be sad.
I mean, if I couldn’t insall an airbagged suspension, and use it to raise one wheel off of the ground without making the car lean to one side, I would have that much less meaning in my life. Without that system, I wouldn’t be able to freak people out by saying. “OMFG someone just stole my wheel!” and then in the same sentence, be able to say, “Oh, I forgot I left the car on three wheels.” If it were not for this ability to install this system, I would not have all of the memeories of the faces people would make when trying to figure out what I had just said and what was going on with my car. Just as if I couldn’t switch between the text and graphical interface of linux, and tinker with the source code, I wouldn’t be able to amaze, annoy, confuse, and/or freak out my friends. But on a more serious note, the customization is not only for comedy, it is for the enjoyment of the customizer, the user, and anyone who likes what the customizer has done. Open source software allows for that, just like the openness of my car. Enjoy and embrace customizability and open source, because if it were not available, the world would be a much more boring place.