Open source

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Open source describes the principles and methodologies to promote open access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is made available to the general public with either relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create user-generated software content through either incremental individual effort, or collaboration.

Some consider open source as one of various possible design approaches, while others consider it a critical strategic element of their operations. 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.[1] Subsequently, open source software became the most prominent face of open source practices.

The open source model of operation can be extended to open source culture in decision making which allows concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial companies.[2] "Open source" as applied to culture defines a culture in which collective decisions or fixations are shared during development and made generally available in the public domain- - - as seen with Wikipedia. This collective approach moderates ethical concerns over a "conflict of roles" or conflict of interest. Participants in such a culture are able to modify the collective outcomes and share them with the community.

Contents

[edit] History

Main article: Open Source history

The "open source" labels came out of a strategy session[3] 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 licensed 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"[4], 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. [5]

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.

[edit] 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 open sourced goods create an environment where new products will not be developed due to a loss in monetary incentive for the creation of new goods. However, history has shown that corporations with large profits often take over smaller emerging technologies to intentionally destroy or slow development of the product. This leads technologies created by open source groups and educational institutions to continue development where the product or technology would otherwise be absorbed.

A counterargument against the "loss of monetary incentive" is that there are other incentives that motivate open source developers to create new information goods[6]. First, making one's product publicly available allows others to test and improve that product, thus also benefiting the original creator, who gains feedback, experience and a better product. Moreover, the creator gains in reputation by producing quality products[7], and this reputation may indirectly be turned into monetary advantage, as when open-source developers are paid for consultancy about the software they have expertise in. Finally, one should not a priori dismiss the incentive of altruism, i.e. the good feelings created by an activity that benefits the community, which is also at the basis of charity giving and volunteer work.


[edit] Food

  • 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.'"[8] 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".[9]
    • 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[10] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Health and science

[edit] Technology

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[edit] 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:
  • 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); and industrial tools such as the open source machine tool project the Multimachine.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Government

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

[edit] Ethics

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.[13]
  • 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.[14]

[edit] Media

Open source journalism — referred to the standard journalistic techniques of news gathering and fact checking, and reflected a similar term that was in use from 1992 in military intelligence circles, open source intelligence. It is now commonly used to describe forms of innovative publishing of online journalism, rather than the sourcing of news stories by a professional journalist. In the Dec 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine this is referred to as user created content and listed alongside more traditional open source projects such as 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 in to 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"[15], 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, "The American Revolution" [16]," which will examine the role that WBCN-FM in Boston played in the cultural, social and political changes locally and nationally from 1968 to 1974, is currently in production by the production company, Lichtenstein Creative Media.

Open Source Filmmaking refers to a form of filmmaking 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 filmmaking 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.

[edit] 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 Connexions Project at Rice University, 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 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.

[edit] 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 eventually donating all his inventions including the Franklin stove, bifocals and the lightning rod to the public domain after successfully profiting off their sales and patents.

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 [1] members.

[edit] 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.[2]

[edit] Criticism

Critics of "open source" publishing cite the need for direct compensation for the work of creation. For example, the act of writing a book, building a complex piece of software, or producing a motion picture can take a substantial number of person-hours. Retaining intellectual property rights over such works greatly increases the feasibility of obtaining financial compensation which covers the labor costs. Proponents argue that without this compensation, many socially desirable and useful works would never be created in the first place. Some critics draw distinctions between areas where open source collaborations have successfully created useful products, such as general-purpose software, and areas where they see compensation as more important and collaboration as less important, such as highly specialized complex software projects, entertainment, or news.

Another criticism of the open source movement is that these projects are not really as self-organizing as their proponents claim. This argument holds that open source projects succeed only when they have a strong central manager, even if that manager is a volunteer. The article Open Source Projects Manage Themselves? Dream On. by Chuck Connell explains this viewpoint. Eric Raymond responded to this criticism here, and Chuck Connell answered here.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) opposes the term "open source" and the professed pragmatism of the open source movement, 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.[17]

[edit] See also

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[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ The complexity of such communication relates to Brooks' law, and it is also described by Eric S. Raymond, "Brooks predicts that as your number of programmers N rises, work performed scales as N but complexity and vulnerability to bugs rises as N-squared. N-squared tracks the number of communications paths (and potential code interfaces) between developers' code bases." —"The Revenge of the Hackers". 2000.
  2. ^ Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. ed 3.0. 2000.
  3. ^ History of the OSI. Open Source Initiative. 2006.
  4. ^ Open Source Summit Linux Gazette. 1998.
  5. ^ Perens, Bruce. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly Media. 1999.
  6. ^ Heylighen, Francis. Why is Open Access Development so Successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information. in: B. Lutterbeck, M. Baerwolff & R. A. Gehring (eds.), Open Source Jahrbuch 2007, Lehmanns Media,.
  7. ^ Lerner, J. & Tirole, J, (2002) Some Simple Economics of Open Source. Journal of Industrial Economics, Vol. 50, No. 2, 197-234.
  8. ^ Stallman, Richard M. The Free Software Definition. Free Software Foundation. 2005.
  9. ^ Cohn, David. "Free Beer for Geeks". Wired News. 18 July 2005.
  10. ^ http://formats-ouverts.org/blog/2004/09/26/131-prisonnier-dune-capsule
  11. ^ Can open-source R&D reinvigorate drug research?
  12. ^ Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source an Answer?
  13. ^ Berry (2004) Internet Ethics: Privacy, Ethics and Alienation - An Open Source Approach. (PDF file)
  14. ^ El-Emam, K (2001). Ethics and Open Source. Empirical Software Engineering 6(4).
  15. ^ http://www.elephantsdream.org/
  16. ^ "The American Revolution
  17. ^ Free Software Foundation: Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source”

[edit] External links

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