Open Minds meets Open Source

What has Open Source have to offer to individuals like me that came from a programming background that was exposed on proprietary software?

The answer is A LOT! Well, that would be the case for people who, like me, would embrace the philosophies of open source systems programming. There are a lot of things that made me think that Open Source is the way to go in the future of programming. First, it boasts of a very competent and easily accessible community of developers waiting to help you with your problems. Second, it gives us the choice to select our own programming language that would fit our style. Third, it is free (most of it). Four, open source systems have proven its record in security and stability. Five, it is being widely used by large corporations in their businesses (e.g. Apache, MySQL, etc.)

Besides these reasons, I know there are still a lot of things that make Open Source Systems can offer. As for me, it has opened my mind and I realized that with the growing trend of people and organizations preferring to use Open Source Software it would be best for me to start learning Open Source.

But this does not mean that along the way you would not encounter roadblocks in learning Open Source Programming. Like me I did have some trouble, learning Java was very very hard, coming from a programming background using visual basic and visual C#. But I had fun tinkering with Ruby on Rails and Python. It might take a while for me to actually roll out enterprise systems but eventually I will be able to.

Hopefully the Open Source Community will always be there to help me in my learning curve...