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The logo of the Open Source Initiative

Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under an open-source license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute 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.^[1]

A report by the Standish Group states that adoption of open-source software models has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers.^[2][3]

History[link]

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.^[4] 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. With open source software, generally anyone is allowed to create modifications of it, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or, in some cases, 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:

• Security
• Affordability
• Transparency
• Perpetuity
• Interoperability
• Localization.^[5]

Particularly in the context of local governments (who make software decisions), Casson and Ryan argue that "governments have an inherent responsibility and fiduciary duty to taxpayers" which includes the careful analysis of these factors when deciding to purchase proprietary software or implement an open-source option.^[6]

The Open Source Definition, notably, presents an open source philosophy, and further defines the terms of usage, modification and redistribution of open source software. Software licenses grant rights to users which would otherwise be reserved by copyright law to the copyright holder. Several open source software licenses have qualified within the boundaries of the Open Source Definition. The most prominent and popular example is the GNU General Public License (GPL), which “allows free distribution under the condition that further developments and applications are put under the same licence” – thus also free.^[7] While open source distribution presents a way to make the source code of a product publicly accessible, the open source licenses allow the authors to fine tune such access.

The open source label came out of a strategy session held on April 7, 1998 in Palo Alto in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator (as Mozilla). A group of individuals at the session included Tim O'Reilly, Linus Torvalds, Tom Paquin, Jamie Zawinski, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Sameer Parekh, Eric Allman, Greg Olson, Paul Vixie, John Ousterhout, Guido van Rossum, Philip Zimmermann, John Gilmore and Eric S. Raymond.^[8] They used the opportunity before the release of Navigator's source code to clarify a potential confusion caused by the ambiguity of the word "free" in English.

Many people claimed that the birth of the Internet, since 1969, started the open source movement, while others do not distinguish between open source and free software movements.^[9]

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), started in 1985, intended the word "free" to mean freedom to distribute (or "free as in free speech") and not freedom from cost (or "free as in free beer"). Since a great deal of free software already was (and still is) free of charge, such free software became associated with zero cost, which seemed anti-commercial.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was formed in February 1998 by Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens. With at least 20 years of evidence from case histories of closed software development versus open development already provided by the Internet developer community, the OSI presented the 'open source' case to commercial businesses, like Netscape. The OSI hoped that the usage of the label "open source," a term suggested by Peterson of the Foresight Institute at the strategy session, would eliminate ambiguity, particularly for individuals who perceive "free software" as anti-commercial. They sought to bring a higher profile to the practical benefits of freely available source code, and they wanted to bring major software businesses and other high-tech industries into open source. Perens attempted to register "open source" as a service mark for the OSI, but that attempt was impractical by trademark standards. Meanwhile, due to the presentation of Raymond's paper to the upper management at Netscape—Raymond only discovered when he read the Press Release, and was called by Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale's PA later in the day—Netscape released its Navigator source code as open source, with favorable results.

Definitions[link]

The Open Source Initiative's definition is widely recognized as the standard or de facto definition.^{[citation needed]}

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was formed in February 1998 by Raymond and Perens. With about 20 years of evidence from case histories of closed and open development already provided by the Internet, the OSI continued to present the 'open source' case to commercial businesses. They sought to bring a higher profile to the practical benefits of freely available source code, and wanted to bring major software businesses and other high-tech industries into open source. Perens adapted the Debian Free Software Guidelines to make The Open Source Definition.^[10]

The Open Source Definition[link]

The Open Source Initiative wrote a document called The Open Source Definition and uses it to determine whether it considers a software license open source. The definition was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written and adapted primarily by Bruce Perens.^[11][12] Perens did not base his writing on the "four freedoms" of Free Software from the FSF, which were only widely available later.^[13]

Perens' principles[link]

Under Perens' definition, open source describes a broad general type of software license that makes source code available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent copyright restrictions. The principles, as stated, say absolutely nothing about trademark or patent use and require absolutely no cooperation to ensure that any common audit or release regime applies to any derived works. It is an explicit "feature" of open source that it may put no restrictions on the use or distribution by any organization or user. It forbids this, in principle, to guarantee continued access to derived works even by the major original contributors.

Proliferation of the term[link]

While the term "open source" applied originally only to the source code of software,^[14] it is now being applied to many other areas such as Open source ecology,^[15] a movement to decentralize technologies so that any human can use them. However, it is often misapplied to other areas which have different and competing principles, which overlap only partially.

Non-software use[link]

The principles of open source have been adapted for many forms of user generated content and technology, including open source hardware.

Supporters of the open content movement advocate some restrictions of use, requirements to share changes, and attribution to other authors of the work.

This “culture” or ideology takes the view that the principles apply more generally to facilitate concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial companies.^[16]

Advocates of the open source principles often point to Wikipedia as an example, but Wikipedia has in fact often restricted certain types of use or user, and the GFDL license it has historically used makes specific requirements of all users, which technically violates the open source principles.

Business models[link]

There are a number of commonly recognized barriers to the adoption of open source software by enterprises. These barriers include the perception that open source licenses are viral, lack of formal support and training, the velocity of change, and a lack of a long term roadmap. The majority of these barriers are risk-related. From the other side, not all proprietary projects disclose exact future plans, not all open source licenses are equally viral and many serious OSS projects (especially operating systems) actually make money from paid support and documentation.

A commonly employed business strategy of commercial open-source software firms is the dual-license Strategy, as demonstrated by Ingres, MySQL, Alfresco, and others.

Widely used open source products[link]

Open source software (OSS) projects are built and maintained by a network of volunteer programmers. Prime examples of open source products are the Apache HTTP Server, the e-commerce platform osCommerce and the internet browser Mozilla Firefox. One of the most successful open source products is the GNU/Linux operating system, an open source Unix-like operating system, and its derivative Android, an operating system for mobile devices.^[17][18] In some fields, open software is the norm, like in voice over IP applications with Asterisk (PBX).

Development philosophy[link]

In his 1997 essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar,^[19] open source evangelist Eric S. Raymond suggests a model for developing OSS known as the bazaar model. Raymond likens the development of software by traditional methodologies to building a cathedral, "carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation".^[19] He suggests that all software should be developed using the bazaar style, which he described as "a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches."

In the traditional model of development, which he called the cathedral model, development takes place in a centralized way. Roles are clearly defined. Roles include people dedicated to designing (the architects), people responsible for managing the project, and people responsible for implementation. Traditional software engineering follows the cathedral model. Fred P. Brooks in his book The Mythical Man-Month advocates this model. He goes further to say that in order to preserve the architectural integrity of a system, the system design should be done by as few architects as possible.

The bazaar model, however, is different. In this model, roles are not clearly defined. Gregorio Robles^[20] suggests that software developed using the bazaar model should exhibit the following patterns:

Users should be treated as co-developers

The users are treated like co-developers and so they should have access to the source code of the software. Furthermore users are encouraged to submit additions to the software, code fixes for the software, bug reports, documentation etc. Having more co-developers increases the rate at which the software evolves. Linus's law states, "Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow." This means that if many users view the source code, they will eventually find all bugs and suggest how to fix them. Note that some users have advanced programming skills, and furthermore, each user's machine provides an additional testing environment. This new testing environment offers that ability to find and fix a new bug.

Early releases

The first version of the software should be released as early as possible so as to increase one's chances of finding co-developers early.

Frequent integration

Code changes should be integrated (merged into a shared code base) as often as possible so as to avoid the overhead of fixing a large number of bugs at the end of the project life cycle. Some open source projects have nightly builds where integration is done automatically on a daily basis.

Several versions

There should be at least two versions of the software. There should be a buggier version with more features and a more stable version with fewer features. The buggy version (also called the development version) is for users who want the immediate use of the latest features, and are willing to accept the risk of using code that is not yet thoroughly tested. The users can then act as co-developers, reporting bugs and providing bug fixes.

High modularization

The general structure of the software should be modular allowing for parallel development on independent components.

Dynamic decision making structure

There is a need for a decision making structure, whether formal or informal, that makes strategic decisions depending on changing user requirements and other factors. Cf. Extreme programming.

Data suggests, however, that OSS is not quite as democratic as the bazaar model suggests. An analysis of five billion bytes of free/open source code by 31,999 developers shows that 74% of the code was written by the most active 10% of authors. The average number of authors involved in a project was 5.1, with the median at 2.^[21]

Licensing[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2012)

A license defines the rights and obligations that a licensor grants to a licensee. Open Source licenses grant licensees the right to copy, modify and redistribute source code (or content). These licenses may also impose obligations (e.g., modifications to the code that are distributed must be made available in source code form, an author attribution must be placed in a program/ documentation using that Open Source, etc.).

Authors initially derive a right to grant a license to their work based on the legal theory that upon creation of a work the author owns the copyright in that work. What the author/licensor is granting when they grant a license to copy, modify and redistribute their work is the right to use the author’s copyrights. The author still retains ownership of those copyrights, the licensee simply is allowed to use those rights, as granted in the license, so long as they maintain the obligations of the license. The author does have the option to sell/assign, versus license, their exclusive right to the copyrights to their work; whereupon the new owner/assignee controls the copyrights. The ownership of the copyright (the “rights”) is separate and distinct from the ownership of the work (the “thing”) - a person can own a copy of a piece of code (or a copy of a book) without the rights to copy, modify or redistribute copies of it.

When an author contributes code to an Open Source project (e.g., Apache.org) they do so under an explicit license (e.g., the Apache Contributor License Agreement) or an implicit license (e.g., the Open Source license under which the project is already licensing code). Some Open Source projects do not take contributed code under a license, but actually require (joint) assignment of the author’s copyright in order to accept code contributions into the project (e.g., OpenOffice.org and its Joint Copyright Assignment agreement).

Placing code (or content) in the public domain is a way of waiving an author’s (or owner’s) copyrights in that work. No license is granted, and none is needed, to copy, modify or redistribute a work in the public domain.

Examples of free software license / open source licenses include Apache License, BSD license, GNU General Public License, GNU Lesser General Public License, MIT License, Eclipse Public License and Mozilla Public License.

The proliferation of open source licenses is one of the few negative aspects of the open source movement because it is often difficult to understand the legal implications of the differences between licenses.With more than 180,000 open source projects available and its more than 1400 unique licenses, the complexity of deciding how to manage open source usage within “closed-source” commercial enterprises have dramatically increased. Some are home-grown while others are modeled after mainstream FOSS licenses such as Berkeley Software Distribution (“BSD”), Apache, MIT-style (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), or GNU General Public License (“GPL”). In view of this, open source practitioners are starting to use classification schemes in which FOSS licenses are grouped (typically based on the existence and obligations imposed by the copyleft provision; the strength of the copyleft provision).^[22]

An important legal milestone for the open source / free software movement was passed in 2008, when the US federal appeals court ruled that free software licences definitely do set legally binding conditions on the use of copyrighted work, and they are therefore enforceable under existing copyright law. As a result, if end-users do violate the licensing conditions, their license disappears, meaning they are infringing copyright.^[23]

Funding[link]

Unlike proprietary off-the-shelf software, which comes with restrictive copyright licenses, open-source software can be given away for no charge. This means that its creators cannot require each user to pay a license fee to fund development. Instead, a number of alternative models for funding its development have emerged.

Software can be developed as a consulting project for one or more customers. The customers pay to direct the developers' efforts: to have bugs prioritized and fixed or features added. Companies or independent consultants can also charge for training, installation, technical support, or customization of the software.

Another approach to funding is to provide the software freely, but sell licenses to proprietary add-ons such as data libraries. For instance, an open-source CAD program may require parts libraries which are sold on a subscription or flat-fee basis. Open-source software can also promote the sale of specialized hardware that it interoperates with, as in the case of the Asterisk telephony software, developed by a manufacturer of PC telephony hardware.

Many open-source software projects have begun as research projects within universities, as personal projects of students or professors, or as tools to aid scientific research. The influence of universities and research institutions on open source shows in the number of projects named after their host institutions, such as BSD Unix, CMU Common Lisp, or the NCSA HTTPd which evolved into Apache.

Companies may employ developers to work on open-source projects that are useful to the company's infrastructure: in this case, it is developed not as a product to be sold but as a sort of shared public utility. A local bug-fix or solution to a software problem, written by a developer either at a company’s request or to make his/her own job easier, can be released as an open source contribution without costing the company anything.^[7] A larger project such as the Linux kernel may have contributors from dozens of companies which use and depend upon it, as well as hobbyist and research developers.

Comparison with closed source[link]

The debate over open source vs. closed source (alternatively called proprietary software) is sometimes heated.

The top four reasons (as provided by Open Source Business Conference survey^[24]) individuals or organizations choose open-source software are: 1) lower cost, 2) security, 3) no vendor 'lock in', and 4) better quality.

Since innovative companies no longer rely heavily on software sales, proprietary software has become less of a necessity.^[25] As such, things like open-source content management system -- or CMS—deployments are becoming more commonplace. In 2009,^[26] the US White House switched its CMS system from a proprietary system to Drupal open-source CMS. Further, companies like Novell (who traditionally sold software the old-fashioned way) continually debate the benefits of switching to open-source availability, having already switched part of the product offering to open-source code.^[27] In this way, open-source software provides solutions to unique or specific problems. As such, it is reported ^[28] that 98% of enterprise-level companies use open-source offerings in some capacity.

With this market shift, more critical systems are beginning to rely on open-source offerings,^[29] allowing greater funding (such as US Department of Homeland Security grants ^[29]) to help "hunt for security bugs."

This is not to argue that open-source software does not have its flaws. One of the greatest barriers facing wide acceptance of open-source software relates to the lack of technical and general support.^[24] Open-source companies often combat this by offering support sometimes under a different product name. Acquia provides enterprise-level support for its open-source alternative, Drupal, for instance.^[30]

Many open-source advocates argue that open-source software is inherently safer because any person can view, edit, and change code.^[31] But closed-source software—and some research^[32] -- suggests that individuals that aren't paid to scrub code have no incentive to do the boring, monotonous work.

Research indicates ^[33] that the open-source software - Linux - has a lower percentage of bugs than some commercial software.

Comparison with free software[link]

The main difference is that by choosing one term over the other (i.e. either "open source" or "free software") one lets others know about what one's goals are. As Richard Stallman puts it, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement."^[34]

Critics have said that the term “open source” fosters an ambiguity of a different kind such that it confuses the mere availability of the source with the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute it. Developers have used the alternative terms Free/open source Software (FOSS), or Free/Libre/open source Software (FLOSS), consequently, to describe open source software which is also free software.

The term “open source” was originally intended to be trademarkable; however, the term was deemed too descriptive, so no trademark exists.^[35] The OSI would prefer that people treat Open Source as if it were a trademark, and use it only to describe software licensed under an OSI approved license.^[36]

OSI Certified is a trademark licensed only to people who are distributing software licensed under a license listed on the Open Source Initiative's list.^[37]

Open source software and free software are different terms for software which comes with certain rights, or freedoms, for the user. They describe two approaches and philosophies towards free software. Open source and free software (or software libre) both describe software which is free from onerous licensing restrictions. It may be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. Free software is not the same as freeware, software available at zero price.

The definition of open source software was written to be almost identical to the free software definition.^[38] There are very few cases of software that is free software but is not open source software, and vice versa. The difference in the terms is where they place the emphasis. “Free software” is defined in terms of giving the user freedom. This reflects the goal of the free software movement. “Open source” highlights that the source code is viewable to all; proponents of the term usually emphasize the quality of the software and how this is caused by the development models which are possible and popular among free and open source software projects.

Free software licenses are not written exclusively by the FSF. The FSF and the OSI both list licenses which meet their respective definitions of free software or open source software.

The FSF believes that knowledge of the concept of freedom is an essential requirement,^[38][39] insists on the use of the term free,^[38][39] and separates itself from the open source movement.^[38][39]

Open source vs. source-available[link]

Although the OSI definition of "open source software" is widely accepted, a small number of people and organizations use the term to refer to software where the source is available for viewing, but which may not legally be modified or redistributed. Such software is more often referred to as source-available, or as shared source, a term coined by Microsoft.

Michael Tiemann, president of OSI, had criticized^[40] companies such as SugarCRM for promoting their software as "open source" when in fact it did not have an OSI-approved license. In SugarCRM's case, it was because the software is so-called "badgeware"^[41] since it specified a "badge" that must be displayed in the user interface (SugarCRM has since switched to GPLv3^[42]). Another example was Scilab prior to version 5, which called itself "the open source platform for numerical computation"^[43] but had a license^[44] that forbade commercial redistribution of modified versions. Because OSI does not have a registered trademark for the term "open source", its legal ability to prevent such usage of the term is limited, but Tiemann advocates using public opinion from OSI, customers, and community members to pressure such organizations to change their license or to use a different term.

Pros and cons for software producers[link]

Software experts and researchers on open source software have identified several advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage for business is that open source is a good way for business to achieve greater penetration of the market. Companies that offer open source software are able to establish an industry standard and, thus, gain competitive advantage^{[citation needed]}. It has also helped build developer loyalty as developers feel empowered and have a sense of ownership of the end product.^[45] Moreover less costs of marketing and logistical services are needed for OSS. It also helps companies to keep abreast of all technology developments. It is a good tool to promote a company's image, including its commercial products.^[46] The OSS development approach has helped produce reliable, high quality software quickly and inexpensively.^[47] The term “open source” was originally intended to be trademarkable; however, the term was deemed too descriptive, so no trademark exists. Besides, it offers the potential for a more flexible technology and quicker innovation. It is said to be more reliable since it typically has thousands of independent programmers testing and fixing bugs of the software. It is flexible because modular systems allow programmers to build custom interfaces, or add new abilities to it and it is innovative since open source programs are the product of collaboration among a large number of different programmers. The mix of divergent perspectives, corporate objectives, and personal goals speeds up innovation.^[48] Moreover free software can be developed in accord with purely technical requirements. It does not require thinking about commercial pressure that often degrades the quality of the software. Commercial pressures make traditional software developers pay more attention to customers' requirements than to security requirements, since such features are somewhat invisible to the customer.^[49]

It is sometimes said that the open source development process may not be well defined and the stages in the development process, such as system testing and documentation may be ignored. However this is only true for small (mostly single programmer) projects. Larger, successful projects do define and enforce at least some rules as they need them to make the teamwork possible.^[50][51] In the most complex projects these rules may be as strict as reviewing even minor change by two independent developers.^[52]

Not all OSS initiatives have been successful, for example, SourceXchange and Eazel.^[45] Software experts and researchers who are not convinced by open source’s ability to produce quality systems identify the unclear process, the late defect discovery and the lack of any empirical evidence as the most important problems (collected data concerning productivity and quality).^[16] It is also difficult to design a commercially sound business model around the open source paradigm. Consequently, only technical requirements may be satisfied and not the ones of the market.^[16] In terms of security, open source may allow hackers to know about the weaknesses or loopholes of the software more easily than closed-source software. It is depended of control mechanisms in order to create effective performance of autonomous agents who participate in virtual organizations.^[53]

Development tools[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

In OSS development, the participants, who are mostly volunteers, are distributed among different geographic regions, so there is need for tools to aid participants to collaborate in source code development. Often, these tools are also available as OSS.

Revision control systems such as Concurrent Versions System (CVS) and later Subversion (svn) and Git are examples of tools that help centrally manage the source code files and the changes to those files for a software project.

Utilities that automate testing, compiling, and bug reporting help preserve stability and support of software projects that have numerous developers but no managers, quality controller, or technical support. Building systems that report compilation errors among different platforms include Tinderbox. Commonly used bugtrackers include Bugzilla and GNATS.

Tools such as mailing lists, IRC, and instant messaging provide means of Internet communication between developers. The Web is also a core feature of all of the above systems. Some sites centralize all the features of these tools as a software development management system, including GNU Savannah, SourceForge, and BountySource.

Projects and organizations[link]

One of the benefits of open source software is that there are a wide variety of codes in oss projects for program developers. Without any blocking of this wide and diverse platform, developers create a wide range of projects and organizations. Some of the "more prominent organizations" involved in OSS development include the Apache Software Foundation, creators of the Apache web server; a loose affiliation of developers headed by Linus Torvalds, creators of the Linux operating system kernel; the Eclipse Foundation, home of the Eclipse software development platform; the Debian Project, creators of the influential Debian GNU/Linux distribution; the Mozilla Foundation, home of the Firefox web browser; and OW2, European-born community developing open-source middleware. New organizations tend to have a more sophisticated governance model and their membership is often formed by legal entity members.^[54]

Several Open Source programs have become defining entries in their space, including the GIMP image editing system; Sun's Java programming language and environment; the MySQL database system; the FreeBSD Unix operating system; Sun's OpenOffice.org office productivity suite; and the Wireshark network packet sniffer and protocol analyser.

Open Source development is often performed "live and in public", using services provided for free on the Internet, such as the Launchpad and SourceForge web sites, and using tools that are themselves Open Source, including the CVS and Subversion source control systems, and the GNU Compiler Collection.

Open Source for America is a group created to raise awareness in the U.S. Federal Government about the benefits of open source software. Their stated goals are to encourage the government’s utilization of open source software, participation in open source software projects, and incorporation of open source community dynamics to increase government transparency.^[55]

Mil-OSS is a group dedicated to the advancement of OSS use and creation in the military.^[56]

Certification[link]

Certification can help to build higher user confidence. Certification could be applied to the simplest component that can be used by developers to build the simplest module to a whole software system. There have been numerous institutions involving in this area of the open source software including The International Institute of Software Technology / United Nations University <http://www.iist.unu.edu>. UNU/IIST is a non-profit research and education institution of The United Nations. It is currently involved in a project known as "The Global Desktop Project". This project aims to build a desktop interface that every end-user is able to understand and interact with, thus crossing the language and cultural barriers. It is drawing huge attention from parties involved in areas ranging from application development to localization. Furthermore, this project will improve developing nations' access to information systems. UNU/IIST aims to achieve this without any compromise in the quality of the software. It believes a global standard can be maintained by introducing certifications and is currently organizing conferences in order to explore frontiers in the field <http://opencert.iist.unu.edu>.

Alternatively, assurance models (such as DO178B) have already solved the "certification" approach for software. This approach is tailorable and can be applied to OSS, but only if the requisite planning and execution, design, test and traceability artifacts are generated.

Criticism[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2007)

The criticisms of the specific Open Source Initiative (OSI) principles are dealt with above as part of the definition and differentiation from other terms. The open content movement does not recognize nor endorse the OSI principles and embraces instead mutual share-alike agreements that require commercial use or the preparation of derivative works.

Of the vocal critics, Richard Stallman of the FSF, flatly opposes the term “Open Source” being applied to what they refer to as “free software”. Although it is clear that legally free software does qualify as open source, Stallman considers that the category is abusive.^[57] Critics also oppose the professed pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative, as they fear that the free software ideals of freedom and community are threatened by compromising on the FSF's idealistic standards for software freedom.^[58][59]

Increasingly^{[citation needed]}, the consensus term "free and open-source software" is used by the communities at large to describe the common ground between free software and open-source software.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

Free software portal

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Androutsellis-Theotokis, Stephanos; Spinellis, Diomidis; Kechagia, Maria; Gousios, Georgios (2010). "Open source software: A survey from 10,000 feet" (PDF). Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management 4 (3-4): 187–347. DOI:10.1561/0200000026. ISBN 978-1-60198-484-5. http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/jrnl/2010-TOMS-OSS-Survey/html/ASKG10.pdf. 
• Fadi P. Deek and James A. M. McHugh (2008). Open Source: Technology and Policy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-36775-5. 
• Chris DiBona and Sam Ockman and Mark Stone, ed. (1999). Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly. ISBN 1-56592-582-3. 
• Joshua Gay, ed. (2002). Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. GNU Press, Free Software Foundation. ISBN 1-882114-98-1. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf. 
• Free Open Source Software Book Author "Understanding FOSS" K.S.Sampathkumar Coimbatore India

Legal and economic aspects[link]

• Benkler, Yochai (2002), “Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm." Yale Law Journal 112.3 (Dec 2002): p367(78) (in Adobe pdf format)
• v. Engelhardt, Sebastian (2008) (PDF). "The Economic Properties of Software", Jena Economic Research Papers, Volume 2 (2008), Number 2008-045. http://ideas.repec.org/p/jrp/jrpwrp/2008-045.html. 
• Lerner, J. & Tirole, J. (2002): ‘Some simple economics on open source’, Journal Of Industrial Economics 50(2), p 197–234
• Välimäki, Mikko (2005) (PDF). The Rise of Open Source Licensing: A Challenge to the Use of Intellectual Property in the Software Industry. Turre Publishing. http://pub.turre.com/openbook_valimaki.pdf. 
• Polley, Barry (2007-12-11) (PDF). Open Source Discussion Paper – version 1.0. New Zealand Ministry of Justice. http://nzoss.org.nz/system/files/moj_oss_strategy_1.0.pdf. Retrieved 2007-12-12. 
• Rossi, M. A. (2006): Decoding the free/open source software puzzle: A survey of theoretical and empirical contributions, in J. Bitzer P. Schröder, eds, ‘The Economics of Open Source Software Development’, p 15–55.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Free software

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Open Source

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Use the Source

• Computerworld article: Does the open-source development model work for business users?
• The Open Source Initiative's definition of open source
• Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution — an online book containing essays from prominent members of the open source community
• Free / Open Source Research Community — Many online research papers about Open Source
• FreeOpenSourceSoftware.org - Wiki on Open Source history, organizations, licenses, people, software.
• KDE developer Aaron Siego's presentation "How OSS Improves Society" at the 2nd Trans-Pacific Open Source Software Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, January 2006.
• Whence The Source: Untangling the Open Source/Free Software Debate, essay on the differences between Free Software and Open Source, by Thomas Scoville
• Berry, D M (2004). The Contestation of Code: A Preliminary Investigation into the Discourse of the Free Software and Open Software Movement, Critical Discourse Studies, Volume 1(1).
• EU study on adopting FLOSS
• Open Source Observatory and Repository
• Calls for open source government
• http://osdir.com "All things open"

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In production and development, open source is a philosophy,^{[1][not in citation given][2][not in citation given]} or pragmatic methodology^{[2][not in citation given]} that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product's design and implementation details.^[3] Before the phrase 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 retooling of the computing source code.^{[citation needed]} Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities.^[4] The open-source software movement was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.^{[citation needed]}

The open-source model includes the concept of concurrent yet different agendas and differing approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial software companies.^[5] A main principle and practice of open-source software development is peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product, source-material, "blueprints", and documentation available at no cost to the public. This is increasingly being applied in other fields of endeavor, such as biotechnology.^[6]

History[link]

This article may not properly summarize the main article. Specific concerns can be found on the Talk page. Please improve this article if you can.

The concept of free sharing of technological information existed long before computers. For example, cooking recipes have been shared since the beginning of human culture.

In the early years of automobile development, a group of capital monopolists owned the rights to a 2-cycle gasoline engine patent originally filed by George B. Selden.^[7] By controlling this patent, they were able to monopolize the industry and force car manufacturers to adhere to their demands, or risk a lawsuit. In 1911, independent automaker Henry Ford won a challenge to the Selden patent. The result was that the Selden patent became virtually worthless and a new association (which would eventually become the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association) was formed.^[7] The new association instituted a cross-licensing agreement among all US auto manufacturers: although each company would develop technology and file patents, these patents were shared openly and without the exchange of money between all the manufacturers.^[7] By the time the US entered World War 2, 92 Ford patents and 515 patents from other companies were being shared between these manufacturers, without any exchange of money (or lawsuits).^[7]

Very similar^[vague] to open standards, researchers with access to Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) used a process called Request for Comments to develop telecommunication network protocols. This collaborative process of the 1960s led to the birth of the Internet in 1969.

Early instances of the free sharing of source code include IBM's source releases of its operating systems and other programs in the 1950s and 1960s, and the SHARE user group that formed to facilitate the exchange of software.^[8][9]

In a foreshadowing of the Internet, software with source code included became available on BBS networks in the 1980s. This was sometimes a necessity; distributing software written in BASIC and other interpreted languages can only be distributed as source code as there is no separate portable executable binary to distribute.

Example of BBS systems and networks that gathered source code, and setup up boards specifically to discuss its modification includes WWIV, developed initially in BASIC by Wayne Bell. A culture of "modding" his software and distributing the mods, grew up so extensively that when the software was ported to first Pascal, then C++, its source code continued to be distributed to registered users, who would share mods and compile their own versions of the software.^{[citation needed]} This may have contributed to its being a dominant system and network, despite being outside the Fidonet umbrella that was shared by so many other BBS makers.

The sharing of source code on the Internet began when the Internet was relatively primitive, with software distributed via UUCP, Usenet, and irc, and gopher. Linux, for example, was first widely distributed by posts to comp.os.linux on the Usenet, which is also where its development was discussed. Linux became the archetype for organized software development orientated around the sharing of source code.

The label “open source” was adopted by a group of people in the free software movement at a strategy session^[10] 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. Linus Torvalds gave an all-important sanction the following day. Phil Hughes offered a pulpit in Linux Journal. Richard Stallman, pioneer of the free software movement, flirted with adopting the term, but changed his mind.^[10] Those people who adopted the term used the opportunity before the release of Navigator's source code to free themselves of the ideological and confrontational connotations of the term "free software". Netscape released its source code under the Netscape Public License and later under the Mozilla Public License.^[11]

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",^[12] 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. At that meeting, the confusion caused by the name free software was brought up. Tiemann argued for “sourceware” as a new term, while Raymond argued for “open source.” The assembled developers took a vote, and the winner was announced at a press conference that evening. Five days later, Raymond made the first public call to the free software community to adopt the new term.^[13] The Open Source Initiative was formed shortly thereafter.^[10]

Starting in the early 2000s, a number of companies began to publish a portion of their source code to claim they were open source, while keeping key parts closed. This led to the development of the now widely used terms free open-source software and commercial open-source software to distinguish between truly open and hybrid forms of open source.^{[original research?]}

Economic analysis[link]

Most economists agree that open-source candidates have an information good^[14] (also termed 'knowledge good') aspect. In general, this suggests that the original work involves a great deal of time, money, and effort. However, the cost of reproducing the work is very low, so that additional users may be added at zero or near zero cost — this is referred to as the marginal cost of a product. At this point, it is necessary to consider a copyright. The idea of copyright for works of authorship is to protect the incentive of making these original works. Copyright restriction then creates access costs on consumers who value the original more than making an additional copy but value the original less than the initial production cost. Thus, they will pay an access cost of this difference. Access costs also pose problems for authors who wish to create something based on another work but are not willing to pay the copyright holder for the rights to the copyrighted work. The second type of cost incurred with a copyright system is the cost of administration and enforcement of the copyright.

Being organized effectively as a consumers' cooperative, the idea of open source is then to eliminate the access costs of the consumer and the creator by reducing the restrictions of copyright. This will lead to creation of additional works, which build upon previous work and add to greater social benefit. Additionally some proponents argue that open source also relieves society of the administration and enforcement costs of copyright. Organizations such as Creative Commons have websites where individuals can file for alternative “licenses”, or levels of restriction, for their works.^[15] These self-made protections free the general society of the costs of policing copyright infringement. Thus, on several fronts, there is an efficiency argument to be made on behalf of open-sourced goods.

Others argue that society loses through open-sourced goods. Because there is a loss in monetary incentive to the creation of new goods some argue that new products will not be created. This argument seems to apply particularly well to the business model where extensive research and development is done, e.g. pharmaceuticals. However, this argument ignores the fact that cost reduction for all concerned is perhaps an even better monetary incentive than is a price increase. In addition, others argue that visual art and other works of authorship should be free. These proponents of extensive open-source ideals argue that monetary incentive for artists would perhaps better be derived from performances or exhibitions, in a similar fashion to the funding of provision of other types of services.

Case study[link]

An investigation of open-source industrial symbiosis was performed by Doyle and Pearce using Google Earth. Their paper^[16] found that virtual globes coupled with open-source waste information can be used to:

1. Reduce embodied energy of transport by reducing distances to recycling facilities
2. Choose end-of-life at recycling facilities rather than landfills
3. Establish industrial symbiosis and Eco-industrial parks on known by-product synergies

Ultimately, the open-source sharing of information in virtual globes provide a means to identify economically and environmentally beneficial opportunities for waste management if the data have been made available.

Applications[link]

Many fields of study and social and political views have been affected by the growth of the concept of open source. Advocates in one field often support the expansion of open source in other fields. For example, Linus Torvalds said, "the future is open source everything."^[17] But Eric Raymond and other founders of the open-source movement have sometimes publicly argued against speculation about applications outside software, saying that strong arguments for software openness should not be weakened by overreaching into areas where the story is less compelling. The broader impacts of the open-source movement, and the extent of its role in the development of new information sharing procedures, remain to be seen.

The open-source movement has inspired increased transparency and liberty in biotechnology research by CAMBIA,^[18] and in the book Democratizing Innovation.^[19] its argued that a trend toward democratized innovation in physical products is occurring like the free and open-source software movement. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open-source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public

Computer software[link]

Blender is an open source 3D graphics editor.

Ubuntu is a popular Linux-based open-source computer operating system.

Android, the most popular mobile operating system (as of 2012)^{[citation needed]}

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.^[20] Open source code can evolve through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. Many of these individuals programmers who start an open source project usually end up as large companies with open source programs.^{[citation needed]} Examples of open-source software products are:^[21]

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
• Chromium — web browser
• Mozilla Thunderbird — e-mail client
• NASA World Wind — virtual globe, geobrowser
• OpenOffice.org (and the LibreOffice fork) — office suite
• PrestaShop — Electronic commerce platform
• ADempiere — (now Free Software forked from Compiere) an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Open Source Software platform for business
• Vue - (Visual Understanding Environment) mind mapping software project of Tufts University

Operating systems

• Android — operating system derived from Linux
• FreeBSD — operating system derived from Unix
• Linux — family of Unix-like operating systems
• OpenIndiana — a free Unix-like 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
• Ruby — general purpose programming language

Server software

• 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
• TYPO3 — enterprise content management system

Electronics[link]

Open-source hardware is hardware whose initial specification, usually in a software format, are published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the hardware and source code without paying royalties or fees. Open-source hardware evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual hardware/software developers, hobbyists, as well as very large companies. Examples of open-source hardware initiatives are:

• Openmoko: a family of open-source mobile phones, including the hardware specification and the operating system.
• OpenRISC: an open-source microprocessor family, with architecture specification licensed under GNU GPL and implementation under LGPL.
• Sun Microsystems's OpenSPARC T1 Multicore processor. Sun has released it under GPL.^[22]
• Arduino, a microcontroller platform for hobbyists, artists and designers.^[23]
• Simputer, an open hardware handheld computer, designed in India for use in environments where computing devices such as personal computers are deemed inappropriate.^[24]
• LEON: A family of open-source microprocessors distributed in a library with peripheral IP cores, open SPARC V8 specification, implementation available under GNU GPL.
• Open Compute Project: designs for computer data center including power supply, Intel motherboard, AMD motherboard, chassis, racks, battery cabinet, and aspects of electrical and mechanical design.^[25]

Beverages[link]

OpenCola, is a open source cola.

• OpenCola — a cola soft drink, similar to Coca-Cola and Pepsi, whose recipe is open source and developed by volunteers. The taste is said to be comparable to that of the standard beverages. Most corporations producing beverages hold their formulas as closely guarded secrets.^[26]
• Vores Øl beer (Open Source Beer) — a beer created by students at the IT-University in Copenhagen together with Superflex, a Copenhagen-based artist collective, to illustrate how open-source concepts might be applied outside the digital world.^[27][28][29]
• In 2002, the beer company Brewtopia in Australia started an open-source brewery and invited the general population to be involved in the development and ownership of the brewery, and to vote on the development of every aspect of its beer, Blowfly, and its road to market. In return for their feedback and input, individuals received shares in the company, which is now publicly traded on a stock exchange in Australia. The company has always adhered to its open-source roots and is the only beer company in the world that allows the public to design, customise and develop its own beers online.^[30]
• Coffee: capsule-based beverage systems such as Nestle's Nespresso or Krups' Tassimo turn home-brewed coffee from an inherently "open-source" beverage into a product limited by the specific range of capsules made available by the system manufacturers.^[31]

Digital content[link]

• Open-content projects organized by the Wikimedia Foundation — Sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary have embraced the open-content GFDL and Creative Commons content licenses. These licenses were designed to adhere to principles similar to various open-source software development licenses. Many of these licenses ensure that content remains free for re-use, that source documents are made readily available to interested parties, and that changes to content are accepted easily back into the system. An important site embracing open-source-like ideals is Project Gutenberg,^[32] which posts many books on which the copyright has expired and are thus in the public domain, ensuring that anyone can use that content for any purpose whatsoever.

Health and science[link]

Medicine[link]

• Pharmaceuticals — There have been several proposals for open-source pharmaceutical development,^[33][34] which led to the establishment of the Tropical Disease Initiative. There are also a number of not-for-profit "virtual pharmas" such as the Institute for One World Health and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.
• Genomics — The term "open-source genomics" was coined to describe the combination of rapid release of sequence data (especially raw reads) and crowdsourced analyses from bioinformaticians around the world that characterised the analysis of the 2011 E. coli O104:H4 outbreak.^[35]

Science[link]

• Research — The Science Commons was created as an alternative to the expensive legal costs of sharing and reusing scientific works in journals etc.^[36]
• Research — The Open Source Science Project was created to increase the ability for students to participate in the research process by providing them access to microfunding — which, in turn, offers non-researchers the opportunity to directly invest, and follow, cutting-edge scientific research. All data and methodology is subsequently published in an openly accessible manner under a Creative Commons fair use license.
• Research — The Open Solar Outdoors Test Field (OSOTF)^[37] is a grid-connected photovoltaic test system, which continuously monitors the output of a number of photovoltaic modules and correlates their performance to a long list of highly accurate meteorological readings. The OSOTF is organized under open source principles -- All data and analysis is be made freely available to the entire photovoltaic community and the general public.^{[citation needed]}

Robotics[link]

An open-source robot is a robot whose blueprints, schematics, and/or source code are released under an open-source model.

Other[link]

VIA OpenBook, is an open-source hardware laptop reference design.

• Open-source principles can be applied to technical areas such as digital communication protocols and data storage formats.
• Open design — which involves applying open-source methodologies to the design of artifacts and systems in the physical world. Very nascent but has huge potential.^[38]
• Open-source-appropriate technology (OSAT) refers to technologies that are designed in the same fashion as free and open-source software.^[39] These technologies must be “appropriate technology” (AT) — meaning technology that is designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economic aspects of the community it is intended for. An example of this application is the use of open-source 3D printers like the RepRap to manufacture appropriate technology.^[40]
• Teaching — which involves applying the concepts of open source to instruction using a shared web space as a platform to improve upon learning, organizational, and management challenges. An example of an Open-source courseware is the Java Education & Development Initiative (JEDI).^[41] Other examples include wikiversity. At the university level, the use of open-source-appropriate technology classroom projects has been shown to be successful in forging the connection between science/engineering and social benefit:^[42] This approach has the potential to use university students’ access to resources and testing equipment in furthering the development of appropriate technology. Similarly OSAT has been used as a tool for improving service learning.^[43][44]
• There are few examples of business information (methodologies, advice, guidance, practices) using the open-source model, although this is another case where the potential is enormous. ITIL is close to open source. It uses the Cathedral model (no mechanism exists for user contribution) and the content must be bought for a fee that is small by business consulting standards (hundreds of British pounds). Various checklists are published by government, banks or accounting firms.

Society and culture[link]

This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (May 2012)

Open-source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open-source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.

The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a growing tension between creative practices that involve appropriation, and therefore require access to content that is often copyrighted, and increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing access to copyrighted content. The two main ways in which intellectual property laws became more restrictive in the 20th century were extensions to the term of copyright (particularly in the United States) and penalties, such as those articulated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), placed on attempts to circumvent anti-piracy technologies.^[45]

Although artistic appropriation is often permitted under fair-use doctrines, the complexity and ambiguity of these doctrines creates an atmosphere of uncertainty among cultural practitioners. Also, the protective actions of copyright owners create what some call a "chilling effect" among cultural practitioners.^[46]

In the late 20th century, cultural practitioners began to adopt the intellectual property licensing techniques of free software and open-source software to make their work more freely available to others, including the Creative Commons.

The idea of an "open-source" culture runs parallel to "Free Culture," but is substantively different. Free culture is a term derived from the free software movement, and in contrast to that vision of culture, proponents of open-source culture (OSC) maintain that some intellectual property law needs to exist to protect cultural producers. Yet they propose a more nuanced position than corporations have traditionally sought. Instead of seeing intellectual property law as an expression of instrumental rules intended to uphold either natural rights or desirable outcomes, an argument for OSC takes into account diverse goods (as in "the Good life") and ends.

One way of achieving the goal of making the fixations of cultural work generally available is to maximally utilize technology and digital media. In keeping with Moore's law's prediction about processors, the cost of digital media and storage plummeted in the late 20th Century. Consequently, the marginal cost of digitally duplicating anything capable of being transmitted via digital media dropped to near zero. Combined with an explosive growth in personal computer and technology ownership, the result is an increase in general population's access to digital media. This phenomenon facilitated growth in open-source culture because it allowed for rapid and inexpensive duplication and distribution of culture. Where the access to the majority of culture produced prior to the advent of digital media was limited by other constraints of proprietary and potentially "open" mediums, digital media is the latest technology with the potential to increase access to cultural products. Artists and users who choose to distribute their work digitally face none of the physical limitations that traditional cultural producers have been typically faced with. Accordingly, the audience of an open-source culture faces little physical cost in acquiring digital media.

Open-source culture precedes Richard Stallman's codification of free software with the creation of the Free Software movement. As the public began to communicate through Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) like FidoNet, places like Sourcery Systems BBS were dedicated to providing source code to Public Domain, Shareware and Freeware programs.^{[citation needed]}

Essentially born out of a desire for increased general access to digital media, the Internet is open-source culture's most valuable asset. It is questionable whether the goals of an open-source culture could be achieved without the Internet. The global network not only fosters an environment where culture can be generally accessible, but also allows for easy and inexpensive redistribution of culture back into various communities. Some reasons for this are as follows.

First, the Internet allows even greater access to inexpensive digital media and storage. Instead of users being limited to their own facilities and resources, they are granted access to a vast network of facilities and resources, some free. Sites such as ccMixter offer up free web space for anyone willing to license their work under a Creative Commons license. The resulting cultural product is then available to download free (generally accessible) to anyone with an Internet connection.^[47]

Second, users are granted unprecedented access to each other. Older analog technologies such as the telephone or television have limitations on the kind of interaction users can have. In the case of television there is little, if any interaction between users participating on the network. And in the case of the telephone, users rarely interact with any more than a couple of their known peers. On the Internet, however, users have the potential to access and meet millions of their peers. This aspect of the Internet facilitates the modification of culture as users are able to collaborate and communicate with each other across international and cultural boundaries. The speed in which digital media travels on the Internet in turn facilitates the redistribution of culture.

Through various technologies such as peer-to-peer networks and blogs, cultural producers can take advantage of vast social networks to distribute their products. As opposed to traditional media distribution, redistributing digital media on the Internet can be virtually costless. Technologies such as BitTorrent and Gnutella take advantage of various characteristics of the Internet protocol (TCP/IP) in an attempt to totally decentralize file distribution.

Government[link]

• Open politics (sometimes known as Open-source politics) is a term used to describe a political process that uses Internet technologies such as blogs, email and polling to provide for a rapid feedback mechanism between political organizations and their supporters. There is also an alternative conception of the term Open-source politics which relates to the development of public policy under a set of rules and processes similar to the open-source software movement.
• Open-source governance is similar to open-source politics, but it applies more to the democratic process and promotes the freedom of information.

Ethics[link]

Open-source ethics is split into two strands:

• Open-source ethics as an ethical school — Charles Ess and David Berry are researching whether ethics can learn anything from an open-source approach. Ess famously even defined the AoIR Research Guidelines as an example of open-source ethics.^[48]
• Open-source ethics as a professional body of rules — This is based principally on the computer ethics school, studying the questions of ethics and professionalism in the computer industry in general and software development in particular.^[49]

Media[link]

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 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.

Messageboards are another platform for open-source culture. Messageboards (also known as discussion boards or forums), are places online where people with similar interests can congregate and post messages for the community to read and respond to. Messageboards sometimes have moderators who enforce community standards of etiquette such as banning users who are spammers. Other common board features are private messages (where users can send messages to one another) as well as chat (a way to have a real time conversation online) and image uploading. Some messageboards use phpBB, which is a free open-source package. Where blogs are more about individual expression and tend to revolve around their authors, messageboards are about creating a conversation amongst its users where information can be shared freely and quickly. Messageboards are a way to remove intermediaries from everyday life — for instance, instead of relying on commercials and other forms of advertising, one can ask other users for frank reviews of a product, movie or CD. By removing the cultural middlemen, messageboards help speed the flow of information and exchange of ideas.

OpenDocument is an open document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents (including memos, reports, and books), spreadsheets, charts, and presentations. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format such as OpenDocument avoid being locked into a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business, raises their prices, changes their software, or changes their licensing terms to something less favorable.

Open-source movie production is either an open call system in which a changing crew and cast collaborate in movie production, a system in which the end result is made available for re-use by others or in which exclusively open-source products are used in the production. The 2006 movie Elephants Dream is said to be the "world's first open movie",^[50] created entirely using open-source technology.

An open-source documentary film has a production process allowing the open contributions of archival material, footage, and other filmic elements, both in unedited and edited form. By doing so, on-line contributors become part of the process of creating the film, helping to influence the editorial and visual material to be used in the documentary, as well as its thematic development. The first open-source documentary film is the non-profit "The American Revolution," which went into production in 2005, and will examine the role media played in the cultural, social and political changes from 1968 to 1974 through the story of radio station WBCN-FM in Boston.^{[51][52][53][54]} The film is being produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the non-profit Filmmakers Collaborative. Open Source Cinema is a website to create Basement Tapes, a feature documentary about copyright in the digital age, co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Open-source film-making refers to a form of film-making that takes a method of idea formation from open-source software, but in this case the 'source' for a film-maker is raw unedited footage rather than programming code. It can also refer to a method of film-making where the process of creation is 'open' i.e. a disparate group of contributors, at different times contribute to the final piece.

Open-IPTV is IPTV that is not limited to one recording studio, production studio, or cast. Open-IPTV uses the Internet or other means to pool efforts and resources together to create an online community that all contributes to a show.

Education[link]

Within the academic community, there is discussion about expanding what could be called the "intellectual commons" (analogous to the Creative Commons). Proponents of this view have hailed the Connexions Project at Rice University, OpenCourseWare project at MIT, Eugene Thacker's article on "open-source DNA", the "Open Source Cultural Database", Salman Khan's Khan Academy and Wikipedia as examples of applying open source outside the realm of computer software.

Open-source curricula are instructional resources whose digital source can be freely used, distributed and modified.

Another strand to the academic community is in the area of research. Many funded research projects produce software as part of their work. There is an increasing interest in making the outputs of such projects available under an open-source license. In the UK the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has developed a policy on open source software. JISC also funds a development service called OSS Watch which acts as an advisory service for higher and further education institutions wishing to use, contribute to and develop open source software.

Innovation communities[link]

The principle of sharing pre-dates the open-source movement; for example, the free sharing of information has been institutionalized in the scientific enterprise since at least the 19th century. Open-source principles have always been part of the scientific community. The sociologist Robert K. Merton described the four basic elements of the community — universalism (an international perspective), communalism (sharing information), disinterestedness (removing one's personal views from the scientific inquiry) and organized skepticism (requirements of proof and review) that accurately describe the scientific community today. These principles are, in part, complemented by US law's focus on protecting expression and method but not the ideas themselves. There is also a tradition of publishing research results to the scientific community instead of keeping all such knowledge proprietary. One of the recent initiatives in scientific publishing has been open access — the idea that research should be published in such a way that it is free and available to the public. There are currently many open access journals where the information is available free online, however most journals do charge a fee (either to users or libraries for access). The Budapest Open Access Initiative is an international effort with the goal of making all research articles available free on the Internet. The National Institutes of Health has recently proposed a policy on "Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information." This policy would provide a free, searchable resource of NIH-funded results to the public and with other international repositories six months after its initial publication. The NIH's move is an important one because there is significant amount of public funding in scientific research. Many of the questions have yet to be answered — the balancing of profit vs. public access, and ensuring that desirable standards and incentives do not diminish with a shift to open access.

Farmavita.Net is a community of pharmaceuticals executives that has recently proposed a new business model of open-source pharmaceuticals.^[55] The project is targeted to development and sharing of know-how for manufacture of essential and life-saving medicines. It is mainly dedicated to the countries with less developed economies where local pharmaceutical research and development resources are insufficient for national needs. It will be limited to generic (off-patent) medicines with established use. By the definition, medicinal product have a “well-established use” if is used for at least 15 years, with recognized efficacy and an acceptable level of safety. In that event, the expensive clinical test and trial results could be replaced by appropriate scientific literature.

Benjamin Franklin was an early contributor eventually donating all his inventions including the Franklin stove, bifocals, and the lightning rod to the public domain.

New NGO communities are starting to use the open-source technology as a tool. One example is the Open Source Youth Network started in 2007 in Lisboa by ISCA members.^[56]

Open innovation is also a new emerging concept which advocate putting R&D in a common pool. The Eclipse platform is openly presenting itself as an Open innovation network.^[57]

Arts and recreation[link]

Copyright protection is used in the performing arts and even in athletic activities. Some groups have attempted to remove copyright from such practices.^[58]

See also[link]

Free software portal

References[link]