What is open source?
What is an open source project?
Open Source is different from shareware, freeware and crowdsourcing. Shareware is a proprietary software provided for free (binary files), usually on a trial basis (the user pay for continued use/support). Freeware is a software provided for free (can be copyrighted or in the public domain). Crowdsourcing is basically an outsourcing of a task to a group of contributors.
Early history
1960s-1970s: sharing source code was commonplace (part of the research cultures). Software was mainly developed in academic and corporate labs by scientists and engineers
Early 1980’s: AT&T enforced its property rights of Linux, to which many academics and other corporate researchers contributed
1985: The Free Software Foundation was established by Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
and emphasizing the practical benefits of OS (economic and technological)
Watch a video of Richard Stallman talking about the open source:
How OS projects evolve?
A project is typically initiated by an individual or a small group having an idea, for an intellectual, personal or business reason. Anyone with the proper programming skills and motivation can use and modify any OS software written by anyone. The project initiators usually become the project “owners” taking responsibility for project management. Others can download, use and “play” with the code (most of them are free riders). However, some go on and modify the code and then they post it on the project website for others to use it and for feedback. In many projects the privilege of adding to the authorized code is restricted to only a few trusted developers a.k.a. “gate keepers”.
Who is using OS?
Early history
1960s-1970s: sharing source code was commonplace (part of the research cultures). Software was mainly developed in academic and corporate labs by scientists and engineers
Early 1980’s: AT&T enforced its property rights of Linux, to which many academics and other corporate researchers contributed
1985: The Free Software Foundation was established by Richard Stallman, a programmer at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
"Software users should freely learn and create; software should be free to use, modify and distribute" The philosophy of The Free Software Foundation1998: the Open Source Movement was founded by prominent hackers, replacing the term “free software”
and emphasizing the practical benefits of OS (economic and technological)
Watch a video of Richard Stallman talking about the open source:
How OS projects evolve?
A project is typically initiated by an individual or a small group having an idea, for an intellectual, personal or business reason. Anyone with the proper programming skills and motivation can use and modify any OS software written by anyone. The project initiators usually become the project “owners” taking responsibility for project management. Others can download, use and “play” with the code (most of them are free riders). However, some go on and modify the code and then they post it on the project website for others to use it and for feedback. In many projects the privilege of adding to the authorized code is restricted to only a few trusted developers a.k.a. “gate keepers”.
Who is using OS?
- 20% of Internet users use Firefox (source: www.statowl.com, 06-2012)
- Facebook uses PHP and MySQL and is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system
- Google has over one million servers running a customized Linux version as an operating system
- 50% of web servers employ Apache
- 60% of web servers use Linux as an operating system
- PERL and PHP are the dominant scripting languages
No comments:
Post a Comment