Against microsoft's monopoly

Reading materials this week were interesting, but it was a little bit hard to me. I’m not tech-savvy at all. I’ve only used Internet Explorer (IE) until I use Safary in the States, which is only 3 or 4 years back. Although I remember the days when I opened Netscape a couple of times when I was in high school, rest of my life so far I was with Internet Explorer.

To be honest, I even had never heard of Firefox. When I first came here in Austin, last semester, taking Dr. Coleman’s Visual Journalism class, until she mentioned Firefox, I didn't know what it is. When she mentioned Firefox, I saw the weird looking icon, a orange-color fox embracing a globe, and it was really awkward and I thought I'll not use it. 

Well, it hasn't been that long that I started opening Firefox. While I was learning photoshop, my TA taught us how to “view background of image.” Because in Safary, I cannot view the background, so I opened Firefox and I could see image of the background. 

Even until I read articles this week, I didn’t understand much about what open source is, what Firefox is, what Chrome is.  What I know now is that "open source" is "code that is freely available to anybody who wants to make improvements and share these with everybody else, according to  Firefox swings to the rescue. And Netizens’ involvement helped in development of web browser like Firefox or Linux. And those open-source web browsers are developed against the monopoly of Micrsoft.

I think firefox is known in Korea recently. I think most of public people are using Internet Explorer still a lot. While I was researching about it in Korean websites, Naver encyclopedia (Naver is a search engine like google in Korea and many people are using it), it said that most websites in Korea is using Active X, so when people use Internet banking or internet shopping, Firefox may cause conflicts or some problems when they transact. 

Hmm.. I'm really behind the recent technologies, so it's really hard to understand articles, and I don't have much opinions on open source yet. I was curious how the development or open source run, but the article Firefox swings to the rescue explains on this: "...financed by donations and a share of search-related advertising."

I'd like to raise a question because still open source (or open source web browser) is very vague to me. What can I do with open source? Is this something that I should care about? Why it's important? (Does my question make sense? Hopefully it's not a rude question. Because it's only texts, I may sound like rude. :) )