My friendship with Open Source started during my studies in the university. Then i’ve found out that lots of commercial software products have their free equivalents which are not worse (and sometimes even better). I’ve found out about Open Source afterwards, also about various licenses types of this, you can say, worldwide movement, found out about Linux (free, open source operating system). Even my bachelor’s degree work was related to this thing. Because my work’s advisor was a huge fan of this stuff, used Linux operating systems and other open source programs. I won’t tell about my work’s results, there was not much practical use of it, more like a theoretical introduction about programs localization for Lithuanian language.
Bit by bit i have get rid of almost every commercial program at home and replaced them with free analogues. And when i came to my first workplace i was given a task to install an internal instant messaging system, and of course, better if free of cost 🙂 So that’s was the start of my now older than 10 years acquaintance with Ignite Realtime. To be true, at first it was a free system (instant messaging server – Jive Messenger) distributed by a commercial company Jive Software. Already then an active users community started to build up around this and other free products of a company. Company’s representatives themselves (there were just two men in the company at first) also collaborated and embraced ideas of free open source software. Their business direction changed later and the current free products became not relevant to them. So the source codes of programs has been made public (became Open Source) and handed over to community, so they could continue improving it. Also, for many years now Jive is providing community a place for a site, tools for registering bugs, installers production, collaboration. Read More