Open Source Software or OSS which refers to software that source codes are distributed with no charge or limitations on modification has spawned a significant amount of interest for the past years. It sells this approach as a business model that emphasizes quicker growth and lower overhead as well as a closer customer relationship and exposure to wider market. The concept of Open Source is based on the philosophy of free software wherein it advocates freely available source code as a fundamental right with an inclination of course to a more commercial approach including a business model and development tactic. Encompassing development methodology, this software can be incrementally enhanced and more easily tested that result to a highly dependable product.

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.

It’s no secret that the Firefox developers have had a hard time with Firefox 3.1. Now it looks likely that Firefox 3.1 will be released Firefox 3.5 to reflect the significance of the changes that have been made to the browser.

Shiretoko, as Firefox 3.1 is known, includes a number of new features that the developer team says makes it “feel like much more than a small, incremental improvement over Firefox 3″. Among these changes are TraceMonkey, tag and player support, improvements to user controls over data privacy, and significant changes to the web layout and rendering platform.

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Symbian users will be in for a nice treat next year as the said smartphone operating system have plans of going opensource.

The momentum to turn Symbian into an open source mobile operating system is strong, and developers can expect to see a preliminary version in the first half of 2009, said Lee Williams, nominated executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

In June, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) announced plans to purchase the remaining stock in Symbian and spin it into a royalty-free operating system under the Eclipse Public License. The goal was to harness the innovation of the open source environment to increase market share, as well as to attract application developers.

Go opensource!

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

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.

Majority of the general public feels that Open Source software is inaccessible. There is a lack of focus on user interface design and because of this, users prefer proprietary software’s more discerning interface. People feel that open source software is most likely to lack complete and reachable documentation that makes users stick to it. This may be due to developers focusing more in their software rather than guaranteeing that they indeed have a solid core. Another probable cause is that Open Source programmers tend to program with themselves as the intended audience rather than considering the general public. And mostly, it is widely known that Open Source programmers are so stubborn that they refuse to learn lessons from proprietary software.

Most of the internet infrastructure is an open source software. Take for example the Sendmail which is the dominant and commonly used mail transfer system on the internet. And the most widely used implementation of the Internet Domain Name System is BIND, and the most popular Usenet news server is InterNetNews. With this, you should not be surprised that the force associated with open source has corresponded with the swift expansion of the internet. The Web made good collaboration with the programmers more convenient and possible on a larger degree than before, and other projects such as Linux and Apache which have become hugely successful.