Open Source Daily Journal

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Google proudly announced last October 21, that the source code for the company’s Android mobile phone operating system is FREE of CHARGE and is now AVAILABLE. Those wanting to download the source code can visit the web site for the Android Open Source Project. Google cites that an open source platform that is consistently studied and being improved on and further developed by a responsible community can hasten the development and innovation. It can also open up economic opportunities and ultimately provide the best technological innovations for a better mobile phone user experience. Google is hoping that by making the source code open, it will facilitate to faster development and many applications will be readily available, and it will bring down mobile phone prices.

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The common thing in both the Free Software and Open Source communities’ approaches is the open availability of the source code to developers. Free Software Community provides source codes to developers with the goal of which, that the user is free to do what he wishes with the software’s source code. It is more philosophical in nature. While, Open Source Community believes in providing these source codes to users, with the aim that collaborative efforts can bring productive results. It motivates the users to freely provide their suggestions for the source code and can append it to the existing one. For some years, the communities were working with the same concept and “Open Source” came to be used as a marketing term for free software to reduce the ambiguity, but somehow, it contributed to more problems. So the two communities parted and started their own way. So now you know, “Open Source” is really opposite to the original context of “Free Software”.

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With the coming of a new year, it seems sort of natural to look back and admire the best and forget the rest of the past year with the hope that the coming year would bring something better and brighter. The year 2008 witnesses the release of the Rails 2 application program. Rails 2 packs more features that aim to provide additional capability to program developers to make them more productive and effective. The newest release of Rails boasts of an improved Configuration Management feature paired with better JavaScript loading performance. Aside from these, other note worthy features includes easier View Management, easy Authentication, condensed Migration Syntax, Active Record Data and XML/JSON and upgrades on performance and maintainability.

Adopters and investors are questioning the economic viability of the open source model. Open source solutions are now becoming a choice of large projects and even by conservative businesses. They are now concerned with this question when a few years back this would not have even reached the discussion table. Now more than ever before, even the conservative IT shops are starting to seriously look at when and where open source softwares would make sense to them.

There are some issues that argue that OSS is not long term viable because of the lack of a viable economic model. Successful and expanding implementations of OSS in the mainstream IT world continue to disprove this assumption. Open source does not have a unique business model or a singular model for that matter. The advantage of OSS model is that it can be leveraged within a wide array of profit, non-profit, indirect and direct revenue business model strategies.

Source: eosj.com

Even closely related terms such as free software and open source developed slight distinctions and here are the definitions:

•Public Domain – this is often confused with free software. If a software is in the public domain it is not subject to ownership because it is not copyrighted. There is no limitation on its use or distribution.
•Freeware – commonly used to describe software which can be redistributed but not modified because the source code is not available
•Shareware – it is freely distributed like freeware but is seldom accompanied by the source code and not a free software.
•Open Source – it is a software that comes with consent for anyone to use, copy and distribute, either verbatim or with variations, either free or for a fee

As Unix became a commercial project, it fractured the developer community and resulted to confuse mass of competing standards making it more difficult to develop portable software. Other companies have entered the market place and sold different proprietary versions of Unix. Development rapidly declined and Unix System Laboratories was sold to Novell after several attempts to generate a canonical commercial version. In 1983, GNU (GNU’s Not Unix) project which strongly believed in the Hacker Ethic came about and it reawakened the cooperative spirit that had previously dominated software development. GNU Project’s goal was to develop a freely accessible Unix-operating system that would include command processors, compilers, assemblers, debuggers, interpreters, mailers, text editors and many more.

Unix was originally developed at AT&T Bell Labs and was not a freely available product. But since it was licensed to universities for a nominal amount, it resulted to an explosion of creativity wherein programmers built on each other’s work. The most significant source of Unix development outside Bell Labs was the University of California at Berkeley in which Berkeley’s Computer Science Research group folded their own change and other contributions into a series of release. Berkley Unix was then known as BSD (Berkley Standard Distribution) and included a rewritten file system, virtual memory support, networking capabilities and a series of utilities. But in 1984, Unix was sold as a commercial product through the Unix System

MIT soon collaborated with Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Carnegie-Mellon University. They all thrived to develop software that is able to communicate with each other with the use of the ARPAnet. ARPAnet, built by the Defense Department in 1960 is the first transcontinental high speed data network. It was formerly intended as an experiment in digital communication until is rapidly grew to link hundreds of universities, research laboratories and defense contractors. With this, it allowed free exchange of information along with exceptional speed and flexibility. Programmers then began to dynamically contribute to different shared projects. And all these led to casual principles and guidelines for dispersed software development rooting from the Hacker Ethic.

Open source is tightly entrenched in the Hacker Ethic. The term hacker is defined today as a person who enjoys exploring details of programmable systems which was traced in the late 1950’s MIT’s computer culture. Several members of the Tech Model railroad Club or TMRC, grouped and formed the nucleus of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. These individuals were so into how systems worked. And the word HACK had long been utilized in describing elaborate college pranks devised by MIT students. But TMRC members used the term to describe a task instilled with innovation, style and technical intelligence which led to projects taken not merely to complete beneficial goals but also with some intense creative interest which was called a Hack.