06-03-2013, 04:56 PM
Open Source Software
Open Source.pptx (Size: 2.11 MB / Downloads: 40)
INTRODUCTION
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is available in source code form for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, and improve the software.
Open source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open-source software is the most prominent example of open-source development and often compared to (technically defined) user-generated content or (legally defined) open content movements.
A report by Standish Group states that adoption of open-source software models has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers.
The Open Source Definition is used by the Open Source Initiative to determine whether or not a software license can be considered open source.
Open Source doesn’t just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:
License Must be Technology Neutral
No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.
The free software movement was launched in 1983. In 1998, a group of individuals advocated that the term free software should be replaced by open source software (OSS) as an expression which is less ambiguous and more comfortable for the corporate world.
Software developers may want to publish their software with an open source license, so that anybody may also develop the same software or understand its internal functioning.
Open source software generally allows anyone to create modifications of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it.
Scholars Casson and Ryan have pointed out several policy-based reasons for adoption of open source, in particular, the heightened value proposition from open source (when compared to most proprietary formats) in the following categories:
GNU GPL
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project.
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated GNU operating system development in January, 1984.
The founding goal of the project was, in the words of its initial announcement, to develop "a sufficient body of free software [...] to get along without any software that is not free.“
To make this happen, the GNU Project began working on an operating system called GNU.
This goal of making a free software operating system was achieved in 1992 when the last gap in the GNU system, a kernel, was filled by the third-party Linux kernel being released as Free Software, under version 2 of the GNU GPL.
Linux Distributions
Because most of the kernel and supporting packages are free and open source software, Linux distributions have taken a wide variety of forms — from fully featured desktop, server, laptop, netbook, Mobile Phone, and Tablet operating systems as well as minimal environments (typically for use in embedded systems or for booting from a floppy disk).
One can distinguish between commercially-backed distributions, such as Fedora (Red Hat), openSUSE (Novell), Ubuntu (Canonical Ltd.), and Mandriva Linux (Mandriva), and entirely community-driven distributions, such as Debian and Gentoo, though there are other distributions that are driven neither by a corporation nor a community, perhaps most famously Slackware.
Before the first Linux distributions, a would-be Linux user was required to be something of a Unix expert, needing to know not only what libraries and executables were required to successfully get the system to boot and run, but also important details concerning configuration and placement of files in the system.