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A concept describing the development and
distribution of software. The open source movement revolves around the idea
that software evolves faster and becomes more stable as more people work on
it. This idea ha long been in practice in the Unix world, where code-sharing
and co-development projects are common, but it is anathema to software
companies, which like to develop their products in relative secrecy. One
driving force behind the open source concept is the Open Source Initiative
(osi),
a non-profit organisation. Software developers that wish to use the Open
Source trademark must distribute their software and its source code
for free. Much of the move ment's inspiration comes from Richard Stallman,
the man behind the free software foundation and creator of the
legendary emacs text editor, and Eric Raymond, whose paper The
Cathedral and the Bazaar first brought the open source idea to the
attention of commercial software vendors.
For proof that open source
development works look no further than linux, an operating system
written by Linus Torvalds and subsequently tested and tweaked by tens of
thousands of users united by the enabling technology of the internet. The
intense scrutiny to which Linux has been subjected by its hundreds of
thousands of users has created a stable, bug-free system that now represents
a substantial threat to costly commercial products such as windows.
This is an extraordinary achievement for a piece of software that is free to
anyone.
The first commercial software house to follow the lead of Torvalds,
Stallman and other Luminaries was netscape, which in 1998 released
the source code to its navigator browser into the public domain as
the first stage of the mozilla project. The latest version of
Navigator is based on open source code. Other companies are beginning to
follow Netscape's example, but the open source movement has opponents,
notably Microsoft, which inevitably views it as a threat to its business.
One likely result of the open source initiative is a drop in software prices
as companies struggle to maintain market share in the face of competition
from low-or-no-cost alternatives. |
