In today's open source roundup: See the history of open source in an infographic. Plus: A comparison of LibreOffice 4.0 and Microsoft Office 2013, and a systemd versus sysVinit cheatsheet The open source movement has brought good things to the lives of countless people around the world. But have you ever wondered how it all got started? Check out this infographic that walks you through the birth of open source in the 1950s to today’s thriving open source world. According to Piktochart: From operating systems to development tools and programming languages to browsers and thousands of utilities and applications, Open Source has led the way. Now, discover the movement’s history. More at Piktochart Image credit: InformIT Hat tip: Arccore on Google+ Note that I’ve only included a small chunk of the infographic in the quote box above. Be sure to click through to see the entire thing. I think it’s a great visual representation of how far open source has come over the years. The infographic is based on five Wikipedia articles. Here are links to each of them if you want to enjoy some additional reading: GNU Project Open Source Free Software Movement History of Free and Open Source Software Open Source Initiative LibreOffice 4.0 versus Microsoft Office 2013 Technology Personalized compares LibreOffice 4.0 to Microsoft Office 2013, and finds that LibreOffice 4.0 holds its own against Microsoft’s office suite. According to Technology Personalized: LibreOffice is one of the best productive suites out in the market today. Being a freeware, there is no reason why you shouldn’t try/switch to it, just yet. Popular belief is that a freeware can never be as good as its premium rival, which is true in most cases but not in this one. LibreOffice is gaining ground, being the default productive suite for most Linux distributions and it already has gained a lot of fans. And if Microsoft continues to alienate its users, then they’ll soon be facing a mass upheaval in favor of Libreoffice. More at Technology Personalized Image credit: Technology Personalized Hat tip: Reddit LibreOffice has sure come a long way from where it started, and it’s just going to get better and better as time goes by. I understand that some folks might require Microsoft Office for one reason or another, but it’s surely worth it to give LibreOffice a try and see if it works as a viable replacement for Microsoft Office for most needs. Unless there’s a hugely compelling reason, I can’t see why anyone would want to stay in Microsoft’s world when there’s an open source alternative as good as LibreOffice 4.0. Systemd versus sysVinit cheatsheet LinOxide has come up with a helpful systemd versus sysVinit cheatsheet. According to LinOxide: systemd is the new init system, started with Fedora and now started adopted in many distributions like redhat, suse and centos. This long period we all been using traditional SysV init scripts usually residing in /etc/rc.d/init.d/ directory. These scripts invokes daemon binary which will then forks a background process. More at LinOxide Image credit: LinOxide Hat tip: Reddit With all the brouhaha going on about systemd, it’s nice to see something like this made available. Be sure to click through to the LinOxide article to see a slightly larger version of the cheatsheet. Kudos to LinOxide for providing this useful infographic. What’s your take on all this? Tell me in the comments below. The opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the views of ITworld. Open SourceSoftware Development