open-source

The official website of the United Nation's World Food Programme has launched its new, redesigned and re-engineered website, today, in beta mode: http://beta.wfp.org. The website is now driven by Drupal (woohoo!) and looks pretty cool - a word rarely used in regards with the websites of large, non-profit, international organizations.

We'd like to congratulate everybody who worked hard to make this possible. The team at Phase2 Technology who worked around the clock to make it a reality in Drupal and made sure the website performs well under high traffic loads. The awesome team at The Development Seed who made the website look so stylish, engaging and easy to browse. And of course wfp.org staff, itself, who were the masterminds and have managed the process brilliantly. A special gratitude goes to Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski for evangelizing open-source and Drupal in the highest levels of the international non-profit world.

From me personally: I have to admit that there was something especially gratifying to work on this site, realizing just how much impact World Food Programme has and how crucial and courageous is what they do.

Open-source, as a concept and a phenomenon, is quite special. What fascinates me in the Free/Open Source model is how efficiently it addresses several concerns at the same time: social, business and technological/innovative. Not to forget that it's been proven to actually work.

What is the major driving force behind the Open-Source model? A lot of people have tried to answer this question, with the different degrees of success. There probably is not a single correct answer. The Open-Source idea, like any other philosophical notion, touches aspects of human interaction, and the answer largely depends on the personal perceptions of an individual. I have changed my opinion several times, myself, through the years. Still, I dare give my two cents about the subject.

Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond are truly the founding fathers and patriarchs of the Free/Open Source movement. The fruits of this movement are well-known even for the non-geek audience. They include the Linux operating system, Firefox browser, OpenOffice suite, MySQL database, plus a plethora of PHP-based content-management systems like WordPress and Drupal which are the driving engines behind the blogosphere... and the list goes on and on.

Despite the fact that the three patriarchs often disagree with each other, their authority is overwhelming enough that when any of them states an opinion, it would be unimaginable for mere mortals like us to disagree with or, God forbid, criticize their ideas. Nevertheless, the "free" in "free software" stands for "liberty", the word that precisely characterizes the Free Software community, a community where any opinion has the right for existance and search for ultimate truth is the path of continued "disrespect" towards authoritative opinions. Besides, we the bloggers are well-known for our arrogance so, the heck with it! We are going to disagree with Linus Torvalds in this posting.