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Open source describes general practices in production and development which promote access to the end product's sources. It is regarded by some as a philosophy and by others a pragmatic methodology. Developers and producers had used many different phrases and jargon words before open source became widely adopted, as the early Internet years provided a rapid convergence of diverse production models and communication paths.[1] With the revolutionary increase in interactive communities and their direct involvement with the Internet, open-source software became the most prominent face of open source. Even though the Internet started in 1969 with open standards like RFCs, it wasn't until 1998 that open source became a label applied to software to denote the same kind of collaborative effort that began the Internet. The open source model allows for the concurrent use of different agendas and approaches in production, and it contrasts with more isolated models.
History
Open source software in the sense that the source code has been made publicly available has existed since the 1960s. However, in 1984 the Free Software Movement began its campaign for Free Software, meaning software that respects users' freedom and community, and explained that "free" in "free software" means "free as in free speech," and not "free as in free beer." Free software commonly can be obtained at zero cost so the name does not prevent some misunderstanding of the aim of the movement as "users should never pay," and perception of it as anti-commercial in spirit.
In 1998 the term "open source" was chosen in a strategy session held in reaction to Netscape's announcement of a source code release called Mozilla. This could very well be the term's first recorded use. It was chosen to clarify the potential confusion caused by the ambiguity of the word "free" in the English language. This milestone may have been the birth of the open source movement, but it depends on how the term "open source" is defined. Some other opinions are that the birth of the Internet started the open source movement, or that open source development began when software was freely developed and distributed among academics. Almost immediately, however, critics attacked the term "open source", citing that it fosters an ambiguity of a different kind; That it confuses the mere availability of the source with the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute it.
Later in 1998 the Open Source Initiative was formed. They began using the term "open source" to describe software which follows its own criteria of openness, the Open Source Definition, which differs from the criteria for "free software". The philosophy associated with the term "open source" emphasizes collaborative development, and thus it differs from the philosophy of "free software". Writers and community supporters use the terms Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) or Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) as a way to refer to the "open source" community, which embraces both ideals, and its software, without taking a side between the two philosophies or their methods.
Markets
Software is not the only field affected by open source; many fields of study and social and political views have been affected by the growth of the concept of open source. Advocates in one field will often support the expansion of open source in other fields, including Linus Torvalds who is quoted as saying, "the future is open source everything."
The open source movement has been the inspiration for increased transparency and liberty in other fields, including the release of biotechnology research by CAMBIA and the encyclopedia named Wikipedia, as well as later projects. The open-source concept has also been applied to media other than computer programs, e.g., by Creative Commons. It also constitutes an example of user innovation (see for example the book Democratizing Innovation). Often, open source is an expression where it simply means that a system is available to all who wish to work on it.
Agriculture
- Beverages
- OpenCola is another idea inspired by the open source movement. Soft drink giants like Coke and Pepsi hold their formulas as closely guarded secrets. Now volunteers have posted the recipe for a similar cola drink on the Internet. The taste is said to be comparable to that of the standard beverages.
- Beer. A beer recipe called Vores Øl. Following its release, an article in Wired magazine commented that "as open source spreads beyond software to online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and biological research, it was only a matter of time before somebody created an open-source beer". [2]
Health
Technology
- Computer software
- Open source software — software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. Some examples of open source initiatives are Linux, Eclipse, Apache, Tomcat web server, Mozilla, and various projects hosted on SourceForge.
- Computer hardware
- Open source hardware — hardware whose initial specification, usually in a software format, are published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the hardware and source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source hardware evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual hardware/software developers, hobbyists, as well as very large companies. An example of Open Source Hardware initiatives are: Sun Microsystem's OpenSPARC T1 Multicore processor. Sun states in their Press release: "The source code will be released under an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved open source license."
- Open design — which involves applying open source methodologies to the design of artifacts and systems in the physical world. Very nascent but has huge potential.
Society and culture
Open source as applied to culture defines a culture in which fixations are made generally available. Participants in such an open source culture are able to modify those products, if needed, and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.
Government
Open source government primarily refers to use of open source software and technologies in traditional government organizations and government operations such as voting.
Open source politics is a term used to describe a political process that uses Internet technologies such as blogs and email to provide for a rapid feedback mechanism between political organizations and their supporters. There is also an alternative conception of the term which relates to the development of public policy under a set of rules and processes similar to the Open Source Software movement.
Open source governance is similar to open source politics, but it applies more to the democratic process and promotes the freedom of information.
Media
Open source journalism referred to the standard journalistic techniques of news gathering and fact checking, and reflected a similar term that was in use from 1992 in military intelligence circles, open source intelligence. It is now commonly used to describe forms of innovative publishing of online journalism, rather than the sourcing of news stories by a professional journalist.
The OpenDocument format is an open document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents (including memos, reports, and books), spreadsheets, charts, and presentations. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format such as OpenDocument avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business, raises their prices, changes their software, or changes their licensing terms to something less favorable.
The Creative Commons for entertainment and literature.
Yoga
Open Source Yoga Unity (OSYU), a nonprofit California corporation, was formed to provide a common voice, and the pooling of resources, to resist the enforcement of the copyright protection of any Yoga style thereby ensuring its continued natural unfettered practice for all to enjoy and develop.
Notes
- ^ The complexity of such communication relates to Brooks' law, and it is also described by Eric S. Raymond, "Brooks predicts that as your number of programmers N rises, work performed scales as N but complexity and vulnerability to bugs rises as N-squared. N-squared tracks the number of communications paths (and potential code interfaces) between developers' code bases." -- "The Revenge of the Hackers". 2000.
See also
External links
