Open source

`Open Source' software is now interpreted, by a developing consensus, as software whose licence conforms to the Open Source Definition or the debian free software guidelines which that definition was derived from. However, there are reasonable differences of opinion here, about what does and does not constitute `free software', and the Free Software Foundation, which many would regard as the keeper of the flame for free software, takes a more rigourous approach.

There's a discussion of several licences at CTAN, with pointers to the Perl artistic license, BSD, GPL and LaTeX (LPPL) licences. Apple has open-sourced Darwin (the kernel running under MacOS X), under the Apple Public Source Licence.

There are also analogous licences for text, as opposed to programming code, such as the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Open Content (OPL) and Open Publication licences from opencontent.org. There's a further collection of `open source' licences at google, and an interesting discussion of licence features at `Is Open Source Un-American?. In a related development, MIT is about to (early 2002) make a large volume of lecture material available on the web, for free: the project is called OpenCourseWare@MIT (news about it from New Scientist, MIT report). Linked, I think, is OKI: Open Knowledge Initiative. The Creative Commons is intended to support the sharing of creative works.

Eric S Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar is about the different approaches to free software development. A successor, by the same author, is The Magic Cauldron, which is specifically about the economic arguments in favour of open-source software development. There's some interesting criticism of them by Faré. Ross Anderson's How to Cheat at the Lottery is concerned with an `open-source' model of requirements engineering. In a similar vein, the article Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big is a discussion about the development of Lisp. The publication E-government bulletin included a series of three stories about use of open-source software in the UK government [ 1, 2, 3 ].

Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!

Norman Created: 1 January 2001 Last modified: 17 May 2002