Amongst some technology enthusiasts free and open source software is promoted with a zeal approaching that of Christian evangelism, i.e. the preaching of the gospel or the practice of giving information about a particular doctrine or set of beliefs to others with the intention of converting others to the Christian faith.
Does this mean that free and open source software – also referred to by the acronym FOSS – is now a religion?
Richard Stallman – founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation – has been known to appear at events in pseudo-religious garb masquerading as his alter ego, St IGNucius of the Church of Emacs.
Since the foundation of the FOSS movement a couple of decades ago, there have been many developments in information technology and the working of the internet.
Of these one of the most notable is the development by Google of predictive search terms; as one types, Google tries to anticipate the final search string. This can have some interesting results, as evidenced by the screenshot below.
PDF – Portable Document Format – was originally a proprietary standard developed by Adobe Systems. It was released as an open standard on 1st July 1 2008 and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008, at which time control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer industry experts.
No information is available as to when Judaism, Islam and Catholicism are to be released as open standards under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization. 😉