Open Source : Its All About Ethics

Sometimes before, I was in a seminar on localization and content creation in Indian language. There someone told about open source soft wares that it is emerging trends in soft wares industry but I do not agree with it because all the stories related to software are obviously short, that of open source software is one of the longest amongst them. In fact it could be said that in the beginning, there was only free (libre) software. Later on, property for software was born, and it quickly dominates the software field to the point that it is considered as the only possible model by many geeks. Only recently has software industry considered free soft wares as an option again.

When IBM and other sold the first large scale commercial computers, in the 1960s ,they came with software which was free (libre) ,and distributed with source code and without restriction in forums like the IBM SHARE or the DEC DECUS user groups, or the �Algorithms� section of the �communications of� ACM� journal.

In the late 1960�s, the situation changed after the �unbundling� of IBM software and in mid-1970�s it was usual to find proprietary software ,in the sense that user were not allowed to redistribute it that source code was not available, and that user could not modify the programs.

Late 1970s and 1980s was the time when the roots of current open source software movements were establishing in the leadership of Richard Stallman who was a programmer at the MIT AI Lab, resigned, and launched the GNU Project and the free software foundation. The ultimate goal of the GNU project was to built free operating system, and Richard started by coding some programming tools like compiler, editor etc. as legal tool, the GNU General Public License(GPL)was designed not only to ensure that the software produced by GNU will remain free, but to promote the production of more� and more� free software .on the philosophical side ,Richard Stallman also wrote� the GNU Manifesto, starting that availability of source code and freedom to redistribute and modify software are fundamental rights.

One group was also there named Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) from university of California at Berkeley. That group was working on improving the UNIX system into �BSD Unix�. These efforts were funded mainly by DARPA Contracts, and the dense network of UNIX hackers around the world helped to debug, maintain and improve the system. During many time that software was not redistributed outside the community of holders of UNIX AT & T license .but in the late 1980s it was finally distributed under �BSD License�, one the first open source licenses.

Cygnus was the first commercial company devoted to provide commercial support for GNU software and open source software and provided funds.

In Oct 1991, Linus Torvalds a student of computer science, was implemented the first version of Linux kernel. Soon many people were collaborating to make the kernel more and more usable, and adding many utilities to complete GNU/LINUX, a real operating system. The Linux kernel and the GNU applications used on top of it are covered by GPL.

At the same time on other hand, William and Lynne Jolitz started to write a series in Dobbs Journals and how to port BSD Unix to 1386-based PCs. In July 19192,386 BSD 0.1 is released by William and Lynne Jolitz.

The late 1960s are very exciting times with respect to open source software. Open source system based on GNU/Linux or BSD are gaining public acceptance, and have become a real alternatives to proprietary systems, competing head to head with market leaders (like Windows NT in servers). In many modules, the best choice is already open source (an outstanding case is Apache as Web server, with market share consistently over 50%)

The announcement of liberation of Netscape communicators, in 1998, was starting point of a rush of many companies to understand many open source software. Apple, Corel and IBM, for instance, are trying different approach to use, promotion and development of open source software. The media has to start to give attention to the formally marginal open source software movement, which is now composed now only of individuals and non-profit organization, but also of small and medium companies. On 10 Aug 1998, Linus Trovalds and Linux appear on the cover of Forbes magazine

During the 1990s, many open source projects have produced a good quality of use full and usually high-quality software. Some of them are apache (widely used as http server) , Perl( an interpreted language with lots of libraries), GNOME and KDE( both providing consistent set of Libraries and application to present the casual user with an easy to use and friendly desktop environment). Mozilla (the free software project funded by Netscape to build a www browser), etc. of all these projects dispel the common myth that open source software is mainly focused on server and developer-oriented systems.

Looking at all these events, the following questions easily arises:-
Are we at the beginning of a new model of software industry? This is a question which is difficult to answer for anyone, since there is no known and reliable method for looking into the future. However through this article, I hope to provide readers with some information which can be useful and can use to reach their own answer.

Dhiraj Pandey
B.Tech. Computer Science & Engineering�� (2008 Batch)