Daily Dose of English 127
Open Source
Daily Dose of English 127
Intermediate
Hey everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. This episode, we're gonna be talking about open source. In this episode, I forgot a word there. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about open source, which is something that you might've heard before, but unless you are into computers or you are into technology in general, you might not really know what it is, and that's totally reasonable. Open, so the source code refers to like how something is written on a computer rather, of course, is the code for like a program or how something works. And so like its definition is that it's an open sources. That means that you can see it. It is open. Anybody can see what's going on inside the program. And because most people are never going to see that on most programs. So pretty much any program that you use, unless you're a programmer, you've probably never seen the code, which is totally reasonable. You're not a programmer. But for many of those, you probably can't see the code, even if you wanted to. Even if you wanted to go look at the code, you couldn't. it's hidden or it's closed. And this is also known as proprietary, if I can speak. And that means that some company or person means exclusive control and knowledge over it. Open source is code that anybody can inspect, modify, and enhance, potentially. Some things You can't just change it and everybody suddenly has it changed. There is a process for making changes so that they only get better. But theoretically, anybody can contribute, is usually the word used, contribute to an open source project. And the reason that I wanted to record or thought of recording this episode is one, it's important to me. I use as many open source things as I can in my day-to-day life. And also because the program that I use to record these videos with, OBS, recently got an update and it made me think about open source. and OBS by the way stands for Open Broadcast Service or I think it's service but it's open broadcast something and that open part is the idea that anybody can use it and modify it and change it. And so there's even some companies that sort of have just essentially stolen the source code. It's not actually stealing because it's open. It's free to use and then made big changes and done things. And that is totally fine because it's open source. The idea is that anybody can use it. And there's a lot of great things about open source even if you're never going to be a programmer. One of the biggest things is actually just like security, because it might seem less secure if something is open, but in almost all cases, having potentially thousands of very good programmers looking at something and trying to find the problems and understanding what's happening can actually be really, really good for security. It also means that if you're going to like publish the source code, it has to be like you follow good secure practices or else people are going to be like, hey, that's not good. You shouldn't do that. Right, a common example is that some, when you're building a program, it often doesn't matter if how secure it is, because maybe you're just gonna use it or whatever. And so you might, what's called hard code things in, so it's just a direct link to something or it's a direct, it's a key or something like that, that is important to keep hidden. And you can just hide that if it's closed source, but if it's open, which is not good, because somebody could get access to it in some workaround. And so having things open means that that kind of thing is either caught or just not even ever done in the first place. And there's a lot of really good reasons that come from security in that sort of sense. People are able to see what's going on exactly and go, okay, this is fine, or hey, that's not cool, right? If you use a phone, for example, that is closed source, which is pretty much all of them, and especially things from Apple or Google, you have to just trust that they're doing good stuff with your data and with what you're doing. Sure, it's not necessarily going to impact your life, but do you really want to not know what's happening with the photos of your child or your dog or whatever? Sure, you don't necessarily have to be super private with everything, but also you're putting this into the hands of somebody or a company really that has no morals they do not care about you they only care about making more money and so at least if those companies are forced to be open with what they do or not even forced but they choose to actually because you don't have to if they choose to they at least have some level of responsibility to be like yeah we're doing things fine right it's sort of like if What's an is there another example in the in? Oh, it's like if you go to a restaurant, if you go to a restaurant and you go, hey, can I look inside the kitchen and they go? Nope. you go, oh, why can't I see inside the kitchen? Is it like really dirty? Are they spitting in the, like what's going on back there? I have no idea. And you can't see, so you just don't know. But in a kitchen, in a restaurant where you can see into the kitchen and you can like just see the workers and what they're doing, you can feel a little bit safer that they at least can be seen with what they're doing. And so that's a really big thing about open source. It's just that general, ability of control and not just security, but then also control because you know that you don't have to worry about something breaking or you just getting kicked off of it or whatever. Right, so an example is actually another open source piece of software I use is Audacity, which is, I only use it really very occasionally for some audio recording. And I'm actually using a very old version. which is fine, like I can just do that. It's really old, it works on my computer fine, I don't need it to be updated. But most companies are going to update their things and then usually require you to use those updates. If you've ever played video games online, or played video games, not even online, if you ever played video games in 2024, you know that some games require you to update. whenever you go online or when you open the game. It's like, okay, new update available. You have to download it now or else you cannot play. And you go, well, I don't really want it. The game works fine. I wanna just play my game, please. And they say, nope, sorry, you have to do this. And so that is another big thing. It's like you can just, you have more control. You can do what you want with the software, even if you're not a programmer. That's the big thing that I think a lot of people maybe don't fully realize is that it's not just a thing for programmers or big computer nerds or whatever. It can be a very important thing for everyone. Another good example is like Adobe software. Adobe software is very common for like Photoshop, Adobe edit, all those things. That's very close source and you have to pay for it all the time. And you're on the hook for that forever. And it often doesn't even work as well as like the other, yeah, I'm not actually gonna get into it. I don't know quite enough about it. The idea is that if you decide to not pay for Photoshop, you no longer can use it legally, and you have to rely on other software that isn't the same, that you have to relearn, and so you just have to be okay with that. And so if Adobe decided to suddenly raise the price of everything so that you couldn't afford Photoshop, you can't use it. You can't just say, no, I want to use the version from 2014 that I bought in 2014. They'll be like, nope, you can't do that, which they can legally do, which is all messed up. Anyways, that's sort of, I guess, the rundown of open source. I don't really have a ton else to say on it. There's a lot more things that I would recommend it for. And so if you can, use open source stuff. This does not mean that it's always free, by the way. A lot of open source stuff is free, but it's also that you have access to the source code. And so especially if a company is charging for free, like they're open software, think of that as a good thing. That just means that there is more security and control and stability in general with the program. But that's all that I really have to say on this topic. I find it really interesting and I hope that as the big companies grow and grow, more people decide to use the things that are open source to protect their own to computer use, essentially. But that's all for today. Thank you so very much for listening. I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a little something, but that's all for me and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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