Difference between revisions of "Free and open-source software"

Some major open source software projects

Open source software and similarly Free software* is a software development model involving loose networks of people connected by the internet who collaborate to create and evolve software that is also made freely available for anyone to use. Not only is the end product available to all but the source code used to create it is also free to view and modify. This is the code that commercial software firms normally keep secret.

Making source code available means anyone with the ability can customize the software, spot flaws and improve it. Usually the improvements are made available too, creating a positive feedback loop in the software's evolution. Open Source is becoming a very prominent method of software production and poses a serious challenge to commercial products.

What goes around comes around

If the software is useful to many people then there is a wide audience who are able to spot and report problems, and even fix them. People are motivated to contribute because the result of their work benefits many people. Someone putting in effort on an open-source software project knows there are people of a similar mind-set putting in effort elsewhere that will be useful to them also. What goes around comes around.

Maximum utility

The fact that thousands of other people are able to make use of the software having put in no effort themselves and haven't paid any money simply isn't an issue - after all it costs nothing to replicate the software and the open-source developers are only too happy that it is proving useful to a wider audience. It is truly maximizing it's utility.

Because of the mutual benefits, open source projects encourage collaboration on an almost unheard of scale, as well as promoting rapid evolution and stability of the applications being developed (one might normally consider the last two properties as being mutually exclusive). There are now high quality open source projects filling every major category of software application, including entire operating systems.

*Note: Free software is not the same as Freeware - the latter is not usually distributed with source code and the license may be restrictive.

External links

• Wikipedia entry on the subject of Open source

Organisations

• http://www.fsf.org/ Free software foundation (FSF) website
• http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html FSF Free software definition
• http://www.opensource.org/OSI Open Source Initiative (OSI) website
• http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php OSI Open source definition

Software links

• Wikipedia list of open source software packages
• http://www.linux.org Free and open-source operating system
• http://www.OpenOffice.org Free and open-source office productivity software
• http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox Free and open-source web browser
• http://www.gimp.org Free and open source 2D bitmap-graphics editor
• http://www.blender.org Free and open-source 3D graphics modeller, animator and renderer

• The software that runs this website is open source and is called MediaWiki