The Cloud...And its Many Possibilities

In this weeks lesson we learned about the Cloud and the many possibilities that it can give to users. Dr. Olson explained all that goes into the Cloud.

I was unaware of what the Cloud actually was until this lecture and to be perfectly honest, I didn't even know it existed.

The Cloud consists of open source code that anyone can obtain for free and make changes to if necessary. however as Dr. Olson pointed out just because the programs are free it doesn't mean it is completely free. He compared it to a free puppy, just because it is free upon getting it doesn't mean there won't be future bills down the road.

Having open source code allows access to the code when it is necessary to fix bugs, modify behaviors to the applications and add features. The fact that the code is open makes it a community, not just code as Dr. Olson explained. The community provides collaborative development, support resources and contributions from several parties.

An open source that we use here at UF is Sakai. Sakai was originally designed by the University of Indiana and a university in South Africa. Sakai is a resource that we as students, faculty and staff at UF use everyday.

I found the open source code an interesting concept. I didn't know that things such as Mozilla Firefox, Apache and Linux Operating System are all open source code.

This lesson really opened my eyes to all that is out there involving code that I truly didn't even know existed.

Who knew that the Linux Operating System is the system that Facebook and Google were built upon.

The use of open source code is a wonderful thing that allows individuals from all over to contribute to already great code, making it better and easier to use.