Nitish began sharing his stories with us on open source in May this year. Then, he wrote another one in June and July. In his first article, he explained how to write secure code using Open Web Application Security Project guidelines. Next, Nitish compared three giants in open source content management—Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress—based on these criteria: installation time and complexity, plugin and theme availability, ease of use, and customization and upgrades. Lastly (for now), Nitish shares his thoughts on Andriod's rise to popularity in the hearts of million through open source.
We're excited to have Nitish as a part of our writer community at Opensource.com, and we hope you enjoy his contributions. Get to know him in this Community Spotlight.
The Basics
- Name: Nitish Tiwari
- Opensource.com username: tiwarinitish86
- Location: Bangalore, India
- Occupation: Systems Engineer at Technocube
- Open source connection: My first project was to configure ProcessMaker, an open source tool for managing and creating business processes
- Favorite open source tool or application: ProcessMaker
- Favorite open source topic: Education
Open up to us.
I am a software developer by profession, working in the "Silicon Valley of India," Bangalore. I also work as technical author for some of the leading open source and Linux based magazines. Currently, I am a regular author for Linux User & Developer. I got involved in open source early in my career as an author because of my deep interest in writing and my passion to help people embrace technology. Writing for open source based magazines and websites helps me achieve both.
What are your favorite open tools?
I use several open source tools, both at work and home. At the workplace, I use BugZilla, Jenkins, and Red Hat—among others—for several different work related activities. At home, I keep on exploring new open source tools because I need to cover them as a tech author. Currently, my focus is on Orange HRM, the open source tool for Human Resources management.
What do you wish were more open?
There are several areas that need more openness. One of is hardware. There are advancements now, with the Raspberry Pi and others gaining coverage, but still there is a lot of work to be done. Another area, which I feel needs to be more open are mobile apps. While the leading mobile operating system Android is 'open source', very few of the mobile apps running on Android, or any other mobile operating system, are open source. With the continuous growth of mobile ecosystem, it is really important that these apps become more open because it will help in training and development of more app developers, and it will bring a balance to the app world, avoiding any monopolies.
What do you see are the biggest challenges to openness?
The biggest problem I believe is the thinking that "open" means "free."
People tend to think that if you make something open it doesn't fetch anything apart from a few thanks. This is completely not true. There are a lot of people who are earning a living from working on open source software or for an open source company. I think there is fear of openness, and it's a big challenge that we should work on resolving.
Why choose the open source way?
I believe the open source way is not related only to source code, but it’s a way of life. It instills a sense of accountability and ownership. It involves people, and when people get involved any problem no longer remains just an individual’s problem but then the group’s problem. With such approach to life, I think life will be a lot easier!
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