Gautam Rege, Co-founder and Managing Director, Josh Software, recalls recent  'highs' in the continuing saga of Open Source
 Going through highs and lows or ups and downs is a universal rule of everyone’s life. What does matter is how well we handled our highs to make it even better in the future In terms of Technology, 2015 was all about ‘highs’ and especially in the world of Open Source, it was an extremely good year for it.  In this year, we came across some of the magnificent tie-ups between open source and traditional proprietary companies, industry giants, tech innovation software companies just to name a few. Below are my picks  of highs for the Open Source world:

• All you religious followers of Apple, open up to welcome Open sSurce, as it is on board now. This was one of the biggest stories of the year as Apple open sourced their programming language Swift, which allows developers to use Swift programming language for free.
• One of the Industry leaders in Innovations who are known for creating accessible products, none other than Microsoft also embraced Open Source. .NET and Visual studio are some of the core technologies of Microsoft which are now open sourced. This huge step by Microsoft to open up access to .NET and Visual Studio is going to be extremely beneficial for the developers/users.
• A leader in proprietary software, IBM announced that it will be making its System ML software Open Source. This proprietary software deals with machine-learning technology and will be available to share and modify through the Apache Software Foundation.
• ‘As they say, ‘Change is needed to kill the monotony’. Well, it looks like this thought did hit Wordpress and Automattic, the founders of wordpress.com. When they were facing the stagnancy issues with wordpress.com. Which is why Open Source was taken on board and the entire Wordpress platform was rebuilt. Currently, the best part of this change is that Wordpress has released all its code as open source and it will be available on Github for further inputs. Also now, Wordpress is known for its Open Source blogging software.

Being an Open Source enthusiast, I feel proud to have been associated with Open Source for almost a decade now. I am happy to see, how Open Source is hitting the top charts in the world and making a significant remark with top tech giants. 

Gautam co-founded Josh Software with Sethupathi Asokan in 2007. Gautam, who still codes religiously, leads the marketing of the India-based Josh Software brand across the world apart from being involved in delivering web solutions for the client partners of the organization.
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Open-Source Software (OSS) is computer software with its source 
code made available with a license in which the copyright holder
provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to
anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be
developed in a collaborative public manner. 
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February 7 2016