Help Stefan Campaign If you can spare $1 then help support this site and change someone's life forever? Learn how and why on the Help Stefan campaign page. Or donate $10 and get my guide to spices book as a gift for your donation!

Open Source refers to software where both the binary executable and the source code itself are made freely available to all. This contrasts with 'closed source' where the users pays for a limited license to a compiled executable only.

Open Source:

History

Though 'open source' software has been available since the advent of the computer revolution (especially in academic circles) the first milestone in the modern 'open source' story came in 1984 when the Free Software Movement began its campaign for Free Software (though the term 'free' here was chosen to bear the same connotation as 'Free Speech' rather than zero cost). Because of this ambiguity of usage in English the term 'Open Source was chosen in the mid 1990s to refer to such software.

The current 'guardians' of open source are the Open Source Initiative who define the basic idea behind open source as: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

Open source software is almost inexorable tied to the *nix operating systems (especially Linux and its variants). This is mainly because compilers for these operating systems are generally and freely available. If you are seriously going to have a look at a flavour of unix on your machine then at some point you will both encounter and install open source software on your machine.

In the past, open source has had a reputation for being difficult to use and to install. This is no longer the case and almost all such software now comes with installers so that it does not need to be downloaded and compiled. There are enough pre-complied binaries available. Even when this is not the case there are a number of projects on the web that make downloading and installing software almost automatic (an example being FreeBSD Ports where an installer is downloaded that helps with the downloading, installation and compiling of software packages. Open Source software has generally become more user friendly with better user interfaces based on graphical systems such as Gnome and KDE.

Somewhere there will be an item of open-source software that will do pretty much anything you want to on your PC (the exception being games).

Open Source and Shareware

There is also a major difference between open-source and shareware. Shareware is generally closed source, with only the executable being available in shareware. Shareware, though it allows the user to employ the software for a time, also eventually extracts payment for its use. Being closed source Shareware has recently been used as a home for trojans and viruses thus infecting users' systems by stealth. Unfortunately as many mistakenly associate open-source software with Shareware the distribution of malware in the guise of useful Shareware has also (erroneously) tarred open-source with the brush of 'potentially damaging'. However, as all open source software is provided with source code which anyone can check and compile Open Source is actually much safer than any other software type.

Open Source Development

Large pieces of open-source software tends to be developed collaboratively, often by people who are geographically very distant from one another using sites such as SourceForge which acts as a large repository for open-source projects.

Advocates of the open source project claim that this collaborative approach leads to rapid evolutionary development of new software and say that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.

The movement is gaining momentum and the graphic above has been proposed as a means of promoting those sites that make open source software available.

Open Source: The Future

Though the BSD-based underpinnings of Mac OSX is now based on open source software and open-source offerings are beginning to compete with traditional closed-source software in terms of ease of use and ease of installation it remains to be seen whether such software will make any real inroads into the traditional strongholds of Windows-based personal computers. Though Linux and its derivatives are beginning to become a dominant force in the large-scale server market.

• Next >>