Hi, I'm tom, a new developer working here at 2bebrave; and well, I love all things computers, especially open source and I do all my developing on Linux (Debian Lenny) using the fantastic Aptana IDE and awesome GIMP.

To many, open source, or the idea of free property, intellectual or otherwise, can often be associated with the 'second' choice, the cheaper option when finances are tight. Because, after all, how can anything free ever compare to something that has been created by salaried professionals? In a lot of contexts I think this is often true; my mate will give me his old mobile for free because it's 5 years old and has a cracked screen -- or I can go out and *pay* for a shiny new iPhone :)

But in many ways the world wide web is a different beast, in its short life --it's still just a teenager remember!--, it has unarguably and profoundly changed the world and the ways humans interact. Many academics place the internet alongside those other huge paradigm shifts of the written and printed word, calling it the 'third information age'; Hobart and Schiffman's, Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution for example. In the same way that the very first printing press, the famous Gutenburg press, shook up the foundations of society by empowering the ordinary person with ideas and information that only the social elite could previously access, the internet is turning traditional hierarchies upside down. Here there is no better example than that of Microsoft and Google; Microsoft, the most successful business of all time, is fundamentally built on closed source, yet its chief competitor, Google, is built on open source. Whereas a closed source project can, by virtue of a limited budget, only have a limited number of contributors, an open source project has no such limitations. The internet makes it increasingly easy for people to share ideas, discuss problems and generate broad spectrums of feedback very quickly. So in terms of creative input and even total man-hours, open source projects often receive significantly greater helpings than their closed source counter parts. This is perhaps most apparent in the most widely used and universally trusted web-server applications, Apache, the software responsible for running the majority of the world's websites.

One of the big buzz words in web development is 'standards'; this is about the implementation of a formalised and universally adhered-to set of protocols for the communication and display of information on the internet. Unfortunately we, as in the world, are still behind here, developers are forced to cater for multiple protocols, often having to opt for lowest common denominators which ultimately lower the end user's experience and ease of accessibility. HTML is an open standard and the W3C, a free, not-for-profit service, which maintains this protocol and promotes best practices around its use, has undoubtedly improved the overall quality for the average web user. Openness is easier to access and implement, and the easier something is to access and implement the more people will adhere to it and so the more consistent the internet becomes the easier it will be for us, the developer, to make fantastic websites.