Open Source Archive

I've always had mixed feelings about the Open Source movement because while my feelings suggest that this is surely a great innovation in software development, there are other (many) things that I don't agree with. Nevertheless, I've been contributing to free software (or open source) since 1996 and I'm still doing it. Nothing famous or that you might have heard of, though. But enough that I feel I have some insight on the subject.

I think it's not needed to introduce Richard Stallman, however: Richard Matthew Stallman, or just RMS, is the GNU project founder. It's a little difficult to interview someone like Stallman. I tried to make him talk about some technical issues, but he's extremely concerned about the ideology behind free software. Freedom is his slogan and he defends it as he defends his life." Read Interview.

This is a reaction to the Article "The Paradox of Choice" by Adam Scheinberg: I've held the position that choice is a paradox since my early childhood, and that it is not necessarily a good thing. Remove choice of religion and think of all the wars throughout history that might not have existed.

Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) has published a 96-page report on Open Source software and its potential benefits to business and government. This whitepaper provides an introduction to the report and its findings.

When AT&T balkanized its Unix holdings in 1993, two different companies ended up walking away with pieces of the original Unix. Novell originally bought it all, then decided to keep the Unix source code and sell the Unix trademark -- the name, in other words -- and the Single Unix Specification standards to the X/Open Company. The Open Group, as it is now called, has since learned to use these assets profitably by offering qualification testing and certification for operating systems. If your OS meets certain requirements, passes the qualification tests, and you pay the fees, you get to call it Unix. Should GNU/Linux get certified?

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. Builder AU recently caught up with RMS about his achievements, the Free Software movement and his concerns with the US-Australian Free Trade Agreement. He will be in Australia on October 5 to speak at the Builder Conference in Sydney.

"Based on Open Source Technology" is used by more than one proprietary software company as a marketing boast. Even Microsoft, everybody's favorite symbol of software proprietarism, now boasts about releasing software under an open source license. Obviously, the phrase "Open Source" is now considered a plus when trying to sell software. Will this lead to more open source contributions by companies trying to associate themselves with this "movement" or will it lead to the death of open source as we know it?

In the final part of this series of articles in response to Eric Raymond, an examination of whether a hybrid model is the way forward.

This article discusses the political differences between Mono & dotGNU, two .NET re-implementations.

An article on GNU/OSS, and how it integrates with the current IT situation. GNU: The New World Order.

.NET developer John Carroll wrote two articles on F/OSS claiming that the proprietary model is what drives the economy (article 1, article 2) while Rebecca Reid wrote her own piece "Open-source development models fall flat". What these articles don't discuss is the "fully open standards" model, which is a model Sun Microsystems is particularly fond of, and in a way it falls in between of "closed" and "open". Here's a reply from Sun engineer Glynn Foster to the second article.

Concerns about open source use can fuel internal naysayers at the acquiror who favor an internal solution over acquisition, says LinuxInsider. Embedded open source software may raise questions about maintaining segregation of the acquired code after the acquisition or potential costs to replace portions of the acquired code base.

Today I'm going to talk about why software - any software, all software - actually matters, what the different types of software are, and why you should care about its properties (no matter who you are, or what you do).

While Linux is by no means complete, the broad strokes have been filled in: the operating system, the server software, the database. But at the same time, the stereotype of the lonely programmer working in the wee hours is seriously outdated. The second generation of open source projects responds to specific business demands, and the people building these applications are getting paid -- even if the code they write will be free.