ODIN aims to improve the world through a network of open source cooperatively built mobile applications with a focus on privacy and decentralization.

Introduction

This article intends to give my thoughts and opinions on open source systems and how ODIN Society plans to leverage the benefits of such.

Definitions

ODIN Society — a non-profit co-operative organization owned and operated by its members.

Open Source — pertaining to or denoting a product or system whose origins, formula, design, etc., are freely accessible to the public. (Dictionary.com)

Cooperative—a jointly owned enterprise engaging in the production or distribution of goods or the supplying of services, operated by its members for their mutual benefit (Dictionary.com)

GitHub Repository — A repository is like a folder for your project. Your project’s repository contains all of your project’s files and stores each file’s revision history. You can also discuss and manage your project’s work within the repository.(GitHub.com)

Why does it matter?

Knowledge Sharing

“Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.” — C.S. Lewis

The human mind is the most powerful tool in the known universe, and the old adage that two heads are better than one has stuck for a reason. Scale this to ten minds, a hundred, a million, and what do you have? Keen insight, shifts in perspective, competition, and collaboration all working in unison at advancing a goal.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re building a car or a killer new blockchain powered app like odin.chat being able to access quality information from other talented minds simply helps.

Project Longevity

Markets rise and fall. We’ve seen what a proper bubble can do to the tech industry. Unfortunately, this means that promising concepts, products, and the core code powering them often sink with the ship, and for what? Liquidity issues? The poaching of top talent? This is a shame.

Open source eliminates, or at very least, diminishes the fall out of events such as these and that’s what matters. So when the company goes bust, or your lead dev rides off into the sunset with Google, the product lives on just waiting for the next set of talented hands to pick her up.

Exposure to Outside Talent

Human talent is unquantifiable. However, the idea that it does, in fact, hold value isn’t up for debate. Given this, logic would follow that exposure to the largest number of contributors is in an entities best interest supposing their ideals are altruistic in nature.

In 1991 an unknown student, Linus Torvalds, studying computer science at the University of Helsinki wasn’t satisfied with the stock operating system running his IBM personal computer. So what did he do? Well, like any average person, he set out to build his own. Three years later, and with the help of some 100+ developers, version 1.0 of the Linux kernel was released. (LinuxTrainingAcademy.com)

Fast forward some eighteen years and you see countless entities from single person for fun projects to top ten Fortune Five Hundred companies building on top of the Linux kernel. This was all possible because Linus opted for open source and the desire to leave the world a little better than it was.

Who’s doing open source today?

I’ll save you a bit of reading. EVERYBODY (excuse the hyperbole) is doing it these days. Facebook, Twitter, Google, IBM, Adobe, Samsung, [you get the picture] all make use of immense talent in the open source world in one way or another.

Check out this article, 35 Top Open Source Companies, to learn more about how big tech companies are leveraging the benefits of open source development.

Previewing part two

While part one of this two-part series presented some pretty high-level concepts, I plan on doing a deeper dive on the technical front in part two. Stay tuned and don’t forget to follow me on medium, and ODIN on all other channels to be among the first to read my articles.

Where do I find out more?

Discord Reddit Telegram ODIN Blockchain M.A.S.H. Odin.Chat

Read more about how to get Ø(ODIN) here.

Come on by our discord and be the first to @ [nondiscript | ODIN] with the following message “Open source projects like ODIN reign supreme” to get 50 free Ø (ODIN COIN).

UPDATE: @thegasman claimed this weeks prize.