   #copyright

Open source

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Websites and the Internet

   Open source describes practices in production and development that
   promote access to the end product's source materials—typically, their
   source code. Some consider it as a philosophy, and others consider it
   as a pragmatic methodology. Before open source became widely adopted,
   developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the
   concept; the term open source gained popularity with the rise of the
   Internet and its enabling of diverse production models, communication
   paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, open source software
   became the most prominent face of open source practices.

   The open source model can allow for the concurrent use of different
   agendas and approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized
   models of development such as those typically used in commercial
   software companies. "Open source" as applied to culture defines a
   culture in which fixations are made generally available. Participants
   in such a culture are able to modify those products and redistribute
   them back into the community.

History

   The "open source" label came out of 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" and
   also included Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, and
   Eric S. Raymond. They 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
   listened and released their code as open source under the name of
   Mozilla.

   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. 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.

   This milestone may be commonly seen as the birth of the open source
   movement. However, earlier researchers with access to the Advanced
   Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) used a process called
   Request for Comments, which is similar to open standards, to develop
   telecommunication network protocols. Characterized by contemporary open
   source work, this collaborative process led to the birth of the
   Internet in 1969. An early use of open source was in the 1950s, when
   IBM distributed operating systems in source format and the SHARE user
   group was formed to facilitate the exchange of source code.

   The Open Source Initiative formed in February 1998 by Eric S. Raymond
   and Bruce Perens. With about 20 years of evidence from case histories
   of closed development versus 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 they wanted to
   bring major software businesses and other high-tech industries into
   open source. Bruce Perens adapted Debian's Free Software Guidelines to
   make the Open Source Definition.

   Critics have said that the term "open source" fosters an ambiguity of a
   different kind, in that it confuses the mere availability of the source
   with the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute it. Developers have
   used the term Free/Open-Source Software ( FOSS), or
   Free/Libre/Open-Source Software ( FLOSS), consequently, to describe
   open-source software that is freely available and free of charge.

Markets

   Software is not the only field affected by open source; 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 will often
   support the expansion of open source in other fields, including Linus
   Torvalds who is quoted as saying, "the future is open source
   everything."

   Eric Raymond and other founders of the open source movement have
   sometimes publicly tried to put the brakes on speculation about
   applications outside of software, arguing 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, remains to be seen.

   The open source movement has been the inspiration for increased
   transparency and liberty in other fields, including the release of
   biotechnology research by CAMBIA, Wikipedia, and other projects. The
   open-source concept has also been applied to media other than computer
   programs, e.g., by Creative Commons. It also constitutes an example of
   user innovation (see for example the book Democratizing Innovation).
   Often, open source is an expression where it simply means that a system
   is available to all who wish to work on it.

   Most economists would agree that open source candidates have a public
   goods aspect to them. 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 its price. 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
   yet 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.

   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.
   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 to the business model where extensive research
   and development is done, e.g. pharmaceuticals. However, others argue
   that visual art and other works of authorship should be free. These
   proponents of extensive open source ideals argue that there should be
   no monetary incentive for artists.

Agriculture

     * Beverages
          + OpenCola — An idea inspired by the open source movement. Soft
            drink giants like Coke and Pepsi hold their formulas as
            closely guarded secrets. Now volunteers have posted the recipe
            for a similar cola drink on the Internet. The taste is said to
            be comparable to that of the standard beverages.
          + Beer — A beer recipe called Vores Øl. The beer was 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. The concept expands upon a statement found in the Free
            Software Definition: "Free software is a matter of liberty,
            not price. To understand the concept, you should think of
            'free' as in 'free speech' not as in 'free beer.'" Following
            its release, an article in Wired magazine commented that "as
            open source spreads beyond software to online encyclopedias
            like Wikipedia and biological research, it was only a matter
            of time before somebody created an open-source beer".
          + But before that In 2002 a beer company in Australia,
            Brewtopia, started an open source brewery which invited the
            general population to be involved in the development and
            ownership of the brewery, but asking them to vote on the
            development of every aspect of their beer, Blowfly, and its
            road to market. In return for their feedback and input, they
            received shares in the company, which is now publicly traded
            on one of the Stock Exchanges 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 their own beers online.
          + Coffee - It has been pointed out that 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.

Content

     * 'Open Source' is sometimes used to describe content. This is
       arguable; no open source licenses are used; rather, Open Content
       licenses are used. Such content is properly called 'Open Content'
       or 'Free Content', as applicable.

Health and science

     * Medicine
          + Pharmaceuticals — There have been several proposals for
            open-source pharmaceutical development, 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.
     * Science
          + Research — The Science Commons was created as an alternative
            to the expensive legal costs of sharing and reusing scientific
            works in journals etc.

Technology

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     * Computer software
          + Open source software — 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:
               o Linux kernel - operating system based on Unix
               o Eclipse - software framework for "rich-client
                 applications"
               o Apache - HTTP web server
               o Tomcat web server - web container
               o Blender - 3D graphics application
               o Moodle - course management system
               o Mozilla Firefox - web browser
               o Mozilla Thunderbird - e-mail client
               o OpenOffice.org - office suite
               o OpenSolaris - Unix Operating System from Sun Microsystems
               o Mediawiki - wiki server software, the software that runs
                 Wikipedia
               o Drupal - content management system
               o GNU Compiler Collection - Programming language compiler
                 for C, C++, Java and other languages.

     * Computer hardware
          + Open source hardware — 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:
               o Sun Microsystem's OpenSPARC T1 Multicore processor. Sun
                 has released it under GPL.
               o Arduino, a microcontroller platform for hobbyists,
                 artists and designers.

     * 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.

     * 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).

   Open source principles can also be applied to technical areas other
   than computer software, such as digital communication protocols and
   data storage formats (for instance the Indian development simputer).

Society and culture

   Open source as applied to culture defines a culture in which fixations
   are made generally available. Participants in such an open source
   culture are able to modify those products, if needed, and redistribute
   them back into the community or other organizations.

Government

     * Open source government — primarily refers to use of open source
       software technologies in traditional government organizations and
       government operations such as voting.
     * 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 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.

Education

   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 OpenCourseWare
   project at MIT, Eugene Thacker's article on " Open Source DNA", the
   "Open Source Cultural Database", openwebschool, and Wikipedia as
   examples of applying open source outside the realm of computer
   software.

   Open Source Curriculum are instructional resources whose digital source
   can be freely used, distributed and modified, typically by classroom
   educators. The open source curriculum development process invites the
   feedback and participation in a community of educational practitioners
   working to create a course or unit of study. Such development
   communities can form ad-hoc, within the same subject area or around a
   common student need, and allow for a variety of editing and workflow
   structures. OpenEducator, a non-profit organization launched in March
   2006 using the open source Drupal CMS, aims to support an open source
   curriculum development community for K-12 educators. Another project
   the Open Source Learning Project is an open source curriculum project
   initiated by Oaks Institute of Technology and Career Development-
   Public Safety Services.This project is focused on curriculum and
   training materials for emergency services and developing a resource for
   emergency services related research.

Innovation communities

   The principle of sharing predates 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), communism
   (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 for 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 for 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.

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

   At Bootstrap Austin, an open source community, entrepreneurs provide
   negotiated products/services at no cost to the group. The entrepreneur
   benefits by gaining reputation in the community, experience and an
   improved product. The community is at once a customer and Evangelist
   for the product/service. The entrepreneur monetizes their product or
   service outside the Bootstrap community.

Arts and recreation

   Copyright protection is used in the performing arts and even in
   athletic activities. Groups have attempted to protect such practices
   from being fettered by copyright.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
