If your computer is a recent Macintosh, you already have a very nice piece of free music software: GarageBand, which is part of Apple’s iLife suite, is on your hard drive, ready to go. Open-source software offers you some protection against that dire eventuality. As users of Opcode Studio Vision (which wasn’t open source) learned the hard way, when a company closes its doors, years of creative work in the form of sequencer files can begin to quietly rot. The big advantage is that an open-source program isn’t tied to the fortunes of any single corporate entity.

Most of us lack both the specialized skills and the need to do this - but even so, open-source software is a good thing, and not just because it’s free. “Open source” means that if you’re a computer programmer, you can download the source code and modify it in whatever way you’d like. As much as anything else, the open-source movement is a cultural jab in the eye at capitalism in general and monoliths like Microsoft in particular.

Computers that run the increasingly popular Linux operating system almost always use free, open-source software. Still other programs originate in the “open-source” movement. Once in a while, a talented young developer will release a program as freeware in order to show off his programming chops and develop a buzz in the industry, a move that can lead to a full-time gig.

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