The Open Source Club at the Ohio State University is a registered student organization whose members share a common interest in open source software. We focus on building a strong community of open source users and developers in order to bring the benefits of open development, open standards, and free software to the university community, and beyond. The Open Source is based on the idea that for any software project to be successful, how it works need not be a secret. Open source advocates believe that all users should have access to this information so they can ensure that the software does what they think it does, and so they can use it in any way they like, such as running it on another operating system (which would require re-compilation). Because of this open society, open source projects are worked on by developers around the planet, so, not surprisingly, open source has some of the best translations the software world has to offer. Perhaps you have heard of (or even use) some such projects, including Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, Gaim/Pidgin, OpenOffice.org, Linux, etc. This is only a small sample of what is out there. This open society is not confined to software. Wikipedia comes to mind. Wikipedia allows anyone and everyone to contribute to its massive, free encyclopedia, and look how large they've grown. Open source is a widely debated issue. Should the government store public records in proprietarty formats that require its citizens to purchase a special, copyrighted piece of software to view? Should companies be required to publish the details of how their products work for all to see? Should the anatomy of voting machines be kept a trade secret, or should it be public knowledge? We at the Open Source club welcome anyone and everyone - old or young, newbie or developer, hardware or software, proprietary or free - to attend our weekly meetings and/or join our mailing list, this is the idea of an open society. Come and drop by sometime, and we'll look forward to hearing from you. © Jim Dinan - Creative Commons License