i have been enjoying two different operating system for last two years. i am common user though, not a programmer or app developer. my dual core laptop has been used two years for helping me with my study in college, and also as a media entertainment for me. 2004, i was enjoying my first experience with computer, what’s inside it? Of course we had Windows, windows 98 or XP that time. In my Junior High School, computer began to be one of the most needed thing. We, as students are required to understand how the computer work, and we had to know basic knowledge about it.

Windows was the first flavor, we tasted the beauty of the computer by learning about ms word and excel, text editor or words application and spreadsheet respectively. There were also some games, such as the sims, fifa, dll. it was amazing to experience those old games. there was also internet, internet explorer let us to browse email sites like yahoo and hotmail. in my small village though we are a consumer, i my self was not a nerd. so that was my first experience as technology consumer. i didnt know anything about opensource, and not knowing that operating system wasnt only windows XP. Windows has gave us many thing to taste, from beautiful words application, spreadsheet, and also many games and applications. All i know those was bundled in .exe form, and not free of charge. All this applications and operating systems itself were expensive actually. Well, not sure its lucky or not, we can found many cracked software and games, many list of serial number and keys, It is really not legal, but we just dont realize and consider it much. what we considered that time just whether or not we can get the software and games run well on our old computer.

Now is the days if technology, term Open Source is announced everywhere and every time because of its major advantages over windows.

from wikipedia
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.

maybe these are the major advantages of open source over windows
1. Ability to be modified, remake, redistribute
it suggests us to understand the program or the system better. and actually we can do it by studying from its sources. some people say it is nice because we may knowing better how program work than just use it for ordinary use.
2. Easy of access and the low (no) price
some opensource come with really low price and some of them come with no charge or free.

Some other better things for open source over proprietary software are (Scholars Casson and Ryan)
Security
Affordability
Transparency
Perpetuity
Interoperability
Localisation

Well, know the world of open source comes to us. we should be ready to face it. Windows and its (mostly) proprietary software now still the best for some major applications, and for this reason i still love to use windows. There are many free software too actually, and many ways to learn how to create application that can run on windows. but the term open source and its goal is even more beautiful. From my dual boot ubuntu i learn how Open Source work, i experience the nice service they give, and i’d love to learn more about it too.

source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software