Open Source

Open source refers to the software-industry tradition of developing and sharing source code and standards, and of encouraging collaborative development. Often aligned with hacker culture, open-source software has contributed to many important developments in Internet infrastructure, including BIND, the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon servers that run the Domain Name System; in software, including Linux and the Apache Web server; and in software languages, including Perl, Tcl, and Python. Open source also epitomizes the philosophy of the “gift culture” within the Internet community, wherein people collaborate and exchange information freely in a climate of mutual respect.

Open-source software refers to programs whose source code (the human-readable instructions that make up software) has been openly distributed on the Internet so that others can use, test, develop, and improve them independently. This is in contrast to proprietary software products, where the source code is secret and closely guarded through patents and intellectual-property protection. An example of proprietary software is Microsoft Corporation's Windows operating system (OS); many of the current open-source creations by commercial entities are being generated in reaction to the Microsoft monopoly.

The ethos of open-source software is guided by the hacker ethic, which emphasizes creativity and the sharing of resources for the public, or common, good. Open-source software code is studied and improved upon by other programmers, with such improvements publicly revealed and, under most licenses, distributed freely in a process that encourages constant, continual innovation.

Open-source programs were particularly key in the early development of the Internet, when ARPANET moved to open-architecture networking. Much of what drives the Internet, such as Sendmail and the World Wide Web, is derived from open-source principles.

The Free Software Movement presaged what we now know as the Open Source Movement. In 1983, dismayed by the increasing commercialization of OSs, Richard Stallman, then at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, began the GNU (“GNU's not Unix”) project, which distributed a free version of the UNIX OS. Stallman believed strongly that innovation in computer science could be achieved only if source code was made freely available. Therefore, his Free Software Foundation developed a suite of tools for a robust OS, including Emacs, an editor favored by many hackers, and GCC, a C compiler that would later become very important to the development of Linux OS.

To ensure that GNU software would not evolve into proprietary software, the Free Software Foundation adopted the method of “copyleft,” which keeps software free instead of privatizing it. A software author uses his or her own copyright to guarantee those rights to all users by affixing a standard licensing notice, such as the General Public License (GPL), to the code.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki, developed a free and freely modifiable version of UNIX. He released his code on the Internet, and through collaboration with a global retinue of Internet programmers, Linux, as the version came to be called, has become the fastest-expanding OS in the world. The Linux OS can be downloaded for free over the Internet, and is also available packaged with documentation and technical support by commercial companies Red Hat and Caldera. Not only is Linux popular in North America and Europe, it is also extremely popular in developing nations like South Africa, Mexico, Cuba, India, and the Philippines.

...