Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Before the term open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive re-tooling of the computing source code.
Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, the new phrase "open-source software" was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.
The label “open source” was adopted by some people in the free software movement at a strategy session held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator. The group of individuals at the session included Christine Peterson who suggested “open source”, Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Michael Tiemann and Eric S. Raymond. Over the next week, Raymond and others worked on spreading the word.
The term was given a big boost at an event organized in April 1998 by technology publisher Tim O'Reilly. Originally titled the “Freeware Summit” and later known as the “Open Source Summit”, The event brought together the leaders of many of the most important free and open-source projects, including Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum, Michael Tiemann, Paul Vixie, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape, and Eric Raymond.
Open-source software is software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies.
Examples of open-source software products are:
Application software---
7-Zip — file archiver
Blender — 3D graphics editor
Eclipse — development environment comprising an IDE
GIMP — graphics editor
Inkscape - Vector graphics editor for .svg
Mozilla Firefox — web browser
Mozilla Thunderbird — e-mail client
NASA World Wind — virtual globe, geobrowser
OpenOffice.org (and the LibreOffice fork) - office suite
Operating System---
FreeBSD — operating system derived from Unix
Linux — family of Unix-like operating systems
OpenIndiana — a free Unix-like operating system
Symbian — real-time mobile operating system
ReactOS — operating system built on Windows NT architecture
Haiku — free and open source operating system compatible with BeOS
Programming languages---
Perl — a general purpose programming language
PHP — scripting language suited for the web
Python — general purpose programming language
Server software---
Joomla- Content management system (CMS)
Openclass- Classified content application
Apache — HTTP web server
Drupal — content management system
MediaWiki — wiki server software, the software that runs Wikipedia
MongoDB — document-oriented, non-relational database
Moodle — course management system or virtual learning environment
WordPress — blog software
Media Open-source journalism, referred to the standard journalistic techniques of news gathering and fact checking, and reflected a similar term that was in use from 1992 in military intelligence circles, open-source intelligence. It is now commonly used to describe forms of innovative publishing of online journalism, rather than the sourcing of news stories by a professional journalist. In the December 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine this is referred to as user created content and listed alongside more traditional open-source projects such as OpenSolaris and Linux.
Weblogs, or blogs, are another significant platform for open-source culture. Blogs consist of periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts, using a technology that makes webpages easily updatable with no understanding of design, code, or file transfer required. While corporations, political campaigns and other formal institutions have begun using these tools to distribute information, many blogs are used by individuals for personal expression, political organizing, and socializing. Some, such as Blogspot, LiveJournal or WordPress, utilize open-source software that is open to the public and can be modified by users to fit their own tastes. Whether the code is open or not, this format represents a nimble tool for people to borrow and re-present culture; whereas traditional websites made the illegal reproduction of culture difficult to regulate, the mutability of blogs makes "open sourcing" even more uncontrollable since it allows a larger portion of the population to replicate material more quickly in the public sphere.
(Portions from various sources)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment