Open Source Archive

There's no question that the open source community has a lot going for it. Besides a staggering amount of developer power that can be turned against important problems, the open source movement also has a passion and commitment that the commercial software world often envies.

Last week saw the 20th anniversary of Richard Stallman's decision to quit the MIT and start the GNU Project in 1984, with a goal to creating a platform using 'free' software that a user can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve: the GNU operating system which used widely today in its GNU/Linux form. A year later he founded the Free Software Foundation, a body that seeks to further the development and use of free software. He is also the author of the GNU General Public Licence, the licence under which free software can be distributed. Read his interview with Matt Whipp at PCPro.

In this artile, at Consulting Times, they discuss the costs in the terms of lives and dollars when local governments do not deploy open standards based software for data sharing. Can local governments afford to create redundant applications to meet new Federal standards for first responder alerts, emergency services, law enforcement, broadcasters? Open Source collaborative initiatives may provide the only solution for the US if the people want to create a safer environment.

In preparation for the upcoming FOSDEM confrerence, organizers have posted interviews with Jonathan Corbet, author of the reference book "Writing Linux Device Drivers" and Denis Oliver Kropp, one of the main developers for the DirectFB project, two of the planned participants.

"The Open Code Market (OCM) is both an open market for code, as well as a market for open code. However, it aims mainly to become a free market for software, as well as a market for Free Software. The OCM introduces into the Free/Open Source movement an economic incentive, to help align the priorities of Free/Open Source developers with those of the end users." Read the article here.

"The amazing thing about the free vs. proprietary software race is that free software is in it at all. With all the resources larger proprietary software companies have at their command, you'd think their products would be unfailingly easy to use, virtually bug-free, and priced so low that no one would mind paying for them. But this is not the case. Why isn't it?" Read the article at NewsForge.

In its lawsuit against IBM, the SCO Group has begun a direct challenge to the General Public License--the legal foundation for Linux, numerous other open-source programming projects and software SCO still ships today.

In the world of "free" open source software, there is no greater villain than SCO, owner of the Unix operating system. But the spread of Linux could be hurt by another group--and ironically, it's the free-software proponents themselves, Forbes says.

At this week's RVC Softedge 2003 conference, a group of open source developers argued over innovation, commoditization and how the work really gets done. Among the topics: How far can "open" go in a professional development setting?

What will happen as more corporations see the open source light? Paul Ferris editorializes: "Like it or not, zealots and heretics are finding common ground in the open source holy war."

RMS fights against private software and its social implications is a battle to the death. As he highlights in his speeches, the law created more problems for those who want to publish free software than to those who would like to unveil plans for an atomic bomb. This is what he stated at Zaragoza, during an event organised by Zaralinux and the Giunta citizens.

"SCO's contract dispute with IBM has been accompanied by a smear campaign against the whole GNU/Linux system. But SCO made an obvious mistake when it erroneously quoted me as saying that "Linux is a copy of Unix." Many readers immediately smelled a rat--not only because I did not say that, and not only because the person who said it was talking about published ideas (which are uncopyrightable) rather than code, but because they know I would never compare Linux with Unix." Read RMS' editorial at ZDNet.

Several months ago William Lamb witnessed a heated debate in the open source community, an article titled "The Future Belongs to GNOME; Inertia to KDE," in which it was suggested that GNOME was overtaking the KDE project by being more responsive to the user community's needs.

"This page isn't here to debate whether OpenSource Software(OSS) is high quality or not. The majority of programmers already know that OSS is responsible for the bulk of today's most superior software. In addition, BSD licensed software is known to be generally even Higher in quality than most other types of OSS. This page is here to explain how BSD and similar licenses hurt the OSS community more than they can ever help it, and why developers should use GNU licenses or similar instead." Read the editorial at FreeWebs. Our Take: Yeah... right... :P