One of the biggest causes for the rapid growth of the internet is ‘Open-source’. Open-source has been the fundament which enabled multiple people to develop the programming languages behind the screen. Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify and enhance. This is still an important driving force of technical development. Besides the World Wide Web Open-source also gave birth to ‘’real-life” initiatives. I have summed up the most interesting open-source projects out there.

Farmbot

A beautiful Open Source project I have worked on is Farmbot. Farmbot is an open source project started with a crowdfunding campaign. This is a robot which can take care of your edible garden.

Arduino

Arduino is an Open-source electronic prototyping platform enabling users to create interactive electronic objects. It’s great to make the first steps in coding using the Arduino as you can almost immediately see the result by putting your code to work on the Arduino and see how your code is affecting movement, lights and sound.

Signal

My absolute favorite messenger with end-to-end encryption is Open Source. Signal does everything you expect from a messenger; sending group, text, picture and audio & video messages, and have encrypted phone conversations between Signal users. 

Raspberry Pi

This credit-card sized computer is a low cost desktop computer is enabling people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. I have been using the Raspberry Pi for art installations I have build and made me learn a lot about coding.

WordPress

Most websites have a Content Management System aka CMS. WordPress is one of the most used free and open-source Content Management Systems on the internet. WordPress can power blogs, websites and webshops.

Wikipedia

Knowledge is one of the most valuable assets we can share. Wikipedia help with sharing knowledge across multiple (language) borders. It has become in a short period of time the biggest encyclopedia in the world. Most of the software powering Wikipedia is open source. Wikipedia is one of my favorite showcases of how open-source can change a generation.

Firefox

Firefox is a very reliable browser made for the World Wide Web. The browser is run by the Mozilla foundation and is made for the likes of Open-source fans with privacy in mind.

VLC Media Player

This open source media player is a life saver which can play almost every video file. I have been using this application since I have been using a computer. It’s the life save when you want to play a video file.