Open Source Movement
- Open source movement Wikipedia
The open source movement is an offshoot of the free software movement that advocates open source software as an alternative label for free software, primarily on pragmatic rather than philosophical grounds. The movement was founded in 1998 by John "maddog" Hall, Larry Augustin, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, and others. Raymond is probably the single person most identified with the movement; he was and remains its self-described principal "theorist", but does not claim to lead it in any exclusive sense. The open source movement is "steered" by a loose collegium of elders that includes Raymond, its other co-founders, and such notables as Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum. The founders were dissatisfied with what they saw as the "confrontational attitude" of the free software movement, and favored advocating free software exclusively on the grounds of technical superiority . It was hoped that "open source" and the associated propaganda would become a more persuasive argument to businesses.
- The Open Source Movement
The project he was referring to eventually grew into Linux, the open source operating system. Today, far from being a hobby, Linux has grown into a mainstream operating system. Indeed, following the U.S. Department of Justice's decision to discontinue attempts to have Microsoft broken up, many now view Linux as the only long-term challenge to the all-encompassing power of Microsoft. The term open source refers to software in which the source code is freely available for others to view, amend, and adapt. Typically it's created and maintained by a team of developers that crosses institutional and national boundaries. As such, open source software can't be appropriated by one large proprietary vendor. Additionally, open source is generally more stable than proprietary software. After all, when any programmer can read, redistribute, and modify source code, there are more eyes to spot bugs and provide fixes.
- Open Source Software Movement
The free/open source software movement began in the "hacker" culture of U.S. computer science laboratories (Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT) in the 1960's and 1970's. The community of programmers was small, and close-knit. Code passed back and forth between the members of the community--if you made an improvement you were expected to submit your code to the community of developers. To withhold code was considered gauché--after all, you benefited from the work of your friends, you should return the favor. It was in this environment that Richard Stall man began his computer science career in 1971, as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Artificial Intelligence lab. Stall man worked primarily on ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System, an operating system homebrewed at MIT to run on the DEC PDP-10. In this collegial environment, Stallman and his colleagues built an enormous array of software tools for the PDP-10.
- Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement
I first became interested in the usability of open source software (or the lack of it) while still at UC Berkeley around 2000. I did some work (actually my students did the work!). In the process, I also, met others interested in the topic such as Nancy Frishberg. But I was soon convinced that it was a wasted effort - open source developers did not really understand what usability had to offer, and it was difficult for a UX (User Experience) professional to have much impact. Forward to November 2004. Eugene Eric Kim of Blue Oxen, a company (named in honor of Doug Engelbart) got in touch with me about a "Floss usability sprint" he was organizing. No, not Floss as what dentists nag you about, but Floss as in Free, Open Source, Libre software. I was skeptical, but interested. Eugene sees the problem of open source usability as a problem of collaboration. The open source and usability communities have a lot to offer each other, but don't know how to work together.
- Overview of the Open-Source Movement
Briefly, it is a world-wide movement composed, both formally and informally, of many people who feel that the best way to produce software that will be sophisticated, robust, and (relatively) bug-free is to enlist the cooperation of interested, skilled, altruistic programmers who are willing to work for free, inspired by the twin goals of producing high-quality programs and of working cooperatively with other similarly minded people. The best known example of software coming out of the Open Source movement is probably Linux, but there are other important examples, including: * Apache, the program that runs over 50% of the Web servers in the world;
* perl, a very widely used language for implementing interactive Web pages; and
* BIND, the program that supports the Domain Name Service (DNS), by means of which your browser can find the physical locations of the Webpages you seek.
- Open source Movement
Gets a Lobby
The open source software industry gained a new government lobby Friday with the launch of the National Center for Open Source Policy and Research, introduced during a presentation at the Government Open Source Conference in Portland, Ore. The National Center is a non-profit organization promoting the use of open source software solutions within government IT enterprises. NCOSPR will accomplish this, founder and administrator John Weathers by said, by serving as a facilitator and administrator of projects involving government agencies and the open source community. The National Center will be administered by the Open Source Software Institute on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Miss. It will consist of three components: a National Open Source Resource Center; an academic Open Source Center of Excellence; and an Open Source Public Policy Institute.
- Open source movement key for Internet growth in India
Comparing the Indian Internet market to others like the U.S., net activist John Barlow said that countries which did not have deep ties to the
industrial economy would be more unfettered to harness the Information Age. Indians have a particular strength in being able to deal with
uncertainty, ambiguity and chaos, according to Barlow. The Open Source movement is an extremely powerful model for software development and advancement, and emerging economies like India particularly have a lot to gain from adopting it, according to John Perry Barlow, self-styled "Net prophet." Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) and an outspoken proponent of free speech in digital media, gave an address at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, as part of a two-city tour in India which also included Bombay.
- Free and open software in Malaysia
Malaysia, like most other developing nations, generally has a positive view on the open source movement. Malaysia stands out in the free and open source software (FOSS) movement, mainly because there's a fairly well organized FOSS movement, the media is FOSS-aware, and there's support from the government for FOSS usage. How it all began in Malaysia, is probably very much like how it began elsewhere. Like-minded individuals meet up, they enjoy similar company and share similar ideas. Then a mailing list gets formed. The activities in almost a decade have been numerous, and far reaching. With efforts from helping the local Thalassaemia association, to providing schools with Linux labs, giving advocacy talks and running open source workshops, the community has come a long way.
- The Open Source Movement Gains Ground
Matthew J. Szulik, chair, CEO and president of Red Hat, the leading provider of Linux and open source technology, outlined the challenges and opportunities faced by the movement in the opening plenary session of the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology. Some 250 people filled the auditorium in Charlotte , North Carolina , for the presentation. Szulik began by showing a promotional video whose theme was that despite ignorance, ridicule and opposition, ?truth happens.? It quoted Mohandas K. Gandhi as saying, ?First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.? Szulik said the video captures the spirit of Red Hat. He complimented ASIS&T for setting up wikis and blogs for the Annual Meeting. He noted that in 1997 Red Hat was a magazine company.
- Open-Source Movement Advances
AS the philosophical leader of the free- software movement for nearly 20 years, Richard M. Stallman has often found himself at the center of debate sometimes even the object of it. Last week, he fired the latest round in a war of words that had erupted a few weeks earlier between Microsoft on the one hand, and the backers of open-source and free software on the other. Open source refers to a method of software development in which a program's basic instructions its source code are freely available to anyone who wants to tinker with and, ideally, improve them. The result, according to open-source advocates, is better software that is developed faster. Emblematic of the movement is GNU- Linux, the open-source operating system that has emerged as a competitor to Windows. The free-software movement, espoused by the Free Software Foundation, which Mr. Stallman has led since 1984, is far more ideological than the open-source philosophy. - The Open-Source Movement: 1998 and Onward
By the time of the Mozilla release in 1998, the hacker community could best be analyzed as a loose collection of factions or tribes that included Richard Stall man's Free Software Movement, the Linux community, the Perl community, the Apache community, the BSD community, the X developers, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and at least a dozen others. These factions overlap, and an individual developer would be quite likely to be affiliated with two or more. A tribe might be grouped around a particular codebase that they maintain, or around one or more charismatic influence leaders, or around a language or development tool, or around a particular software license, or around a technical standard, or around a caretaker organization for some part of the infrastructure. Prestige tends to correlate with longevity and historical contribution as well as more obvious drivers like current market-share and mind-share; thus, perhaps the most universally respected of the tribes is the IETF, which can claim continuity back to the beginnings of the ARPANET in 1969.
- Open
source Movement
In 1991 an unknown computer programmer called Linus Torvalds creates an operating system whose name is Linux. It differs from the rest ones in circulation in two ways: 1) the Linux has an ?open code? (that is the heart of the program) which means that any computer programmer is in position of either changing or improving it 2) it is distributed free of expense through the Internet. Linux became a hit overnight, something the ?Free Software Movement?, adherents could not even dream about in 1984 when it was founded to disseminate the idea of ?free access to information?. The program was accepted and improved at a scale that could have neither been part of Richard Stallman?s (chairman of the Free Software Foundation) dreams, nor Bill Gates? nightmares. In just 10 years the program that had 10,000 code lines, reached 2,000,000 ones, its users came up to 9,000,000 and approximately 15,000 computer programmers all over the world have been working to improve it. More than half of the Internet servers throughout the world have been using a Linux version, while companies such as the IBM have been offering it as an alternative to the Microsoft Windows.
- Open source movement alive and kicking
The seventh Asian Open Source Symposium held in Kuala Lumpur last month signalled a new milestone for the open source movement in Asia. One of the chief outcomes of the three-day event was the issue of the ?Kuala Lumpur Statement?, which essentially outlines the establishment of an OSS ecosystem. According to the statement, the ecosystem will be an environment in which ?stakeholders interact, collaborate and leverage on one another in a continuous cycle.? The stakeholders include organisations from the public, private, academic and community sectors. Symbiotic growth is encouraged among these organisations in the OSS ecosystem, says the statement. The three-day event was organised jointly by MIMOS Bhd. and the Centre of International Cooperation for Computerisation (CICC) of Japan. The CICC was established in 1983 to cooperate with and assist developing countries in the introduction of computers and information technology, and to promote computerisation for economic and social development.
- Free and Open Source Movements
This article reviews the development and need for Free and Open Source movements in software development. Part 1 provides a global overview of climates and conditions that fostered the revolution. The recent economic downturn, coupled with increased distrust of Microsoft's dominance, has pushed the previously fringe elements of free and open source software into the lime light. Businesses, universities, and other organizations are exploring the feasibility of integrating free/open source software into their IT systems. Most are discovering a sub-culture of hackers who have created quality software on par with most commercial offerings. This article explores the history, philosophies, and benefits of the Free/Open Source movement.
- Newcomer Bets 'Wiki' Open-Source Movement
A computer entrepreneur from Utah is launching a campaign to unseat incumbent Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) next year -- in what may be the most heavily Internet-reliant campaign to date, using blogs, chats and the "Wiki" open-source model. Peter Ashdown is the founder of Xmission, Utah's oldest Internet service provider (ISP). His Web site includes a blog and a monthly live chat session. But Ashdown's site takes public participation on his campaign Web site one step further -opening his platform to all. The site is based on the "Wiki" open-source model made famous by Wikipedia. A Democrat, Ashdown is hoping to take on the fundraising advantage Hatch enjoys in the predominantly Republican state with the Internet. "My small business resourcefulness gives me the rock and my knowledge of the Internet is the sling.