Open Source Software
Open-source software (OSS) is a The source code of computer software is given under a license under which the copyright holder provides users the right to use, study, alter, and distribute the program to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be produced collaboratively in a public setting. Open-source software is an excellent example of open cooperation.
Open-source software development may bring together viewpoints that are not limited to a particular organization. According to the Standish Group’s 2008 research, the adoption of open-source software models has resulted in annual customer savings of around $60 billion (£48 billion).
Open source software is distributed under a specified license that makes the source code legally accessible to end users. Open source software is often given in source code form for free, allowing users to inspect and modify the code as needed.
The source code may be recycled into new software, which means that anybody can use it to create and publish their own application.
In the early days of computers, programmers and developers exchanged software to learn from one another and advance the profession of computing. In the 1970s and 1980s, the open-source concept fell out of favor with commercial software development. However, academics often built software together. For example, Donald Knuth developed the TeX typesetting system in 1979, and Richard Stallman created the GNU operating system in 1983. Eric Raymond’s 1997 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a reflective examination of the hacker culture and free-software concepts. The article garnered a lot of attention in early 1998, and it was one of the reasons Netscape Communications Corporation decided to make its successful Netscape Communicator Internet suite available as free software. This source code eventually created the foundation for SeaMonkey, Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and KompoZer.
Netscape’s action spurred Raymond and others to investigate ways to apply the Free Software Foundation’s free software concepts and perceived advantages to the commercial software business. They believed that the FSF’s social activity was unappealing to corporations such as Netscape, and sought to rebrand the free software movement to stress the financial benefits of sharing and working on software source code. Bruce Perens, publisher Tim O’Reilly, Linus Torvalds, and others quickly embraced the new phrase “open source”. The Open Source Initiative was established in February 1998 to promote the usage of the new term and spread open-source concepts.
While the Open Source Initiative worked to promote the usage of the new name and the values it upheld, commercial software companies were more concerned about the notion of freely distributed software and universal access to an application’s source code. In 2001, a Microsoft official openly said that “open source is an intellectual property destroyer.” I can’t imagine anything worse than this for the software and intellectual property industries.” While free and open-source software has traditionally played a role outside of the mainstream of private software development, huge corporations such as Microsoft have started to establish formal open-source presences on the Internet. IBM, Oracle, Google, and State Farm are just a handful of the businesses with significant public stakes in today’s competitive open-source market. The business mindset on FOSS development has shifted significantly.
The free-software movement began in 1983. In 1998, a group of people proposed that the word free software be replaced with open-source software (OSS) as a less confusing and more comfortable language for the business sector. Software developers may choose to distribute their software under an open-source license so that others may develop it or learn how it works. Open-source software allows anybody to make changes to it, transfer it to other operating systems and instruction set architectures, share it with others, and, in certain situations, monetize it. Scholars Casson and Ryan have pointed out various policy-based arguments for adopting open source, namely the heightened value proposition from open source (as compared to most proprietary formats) in the following categories:
- Security
- Affordability
- Transparency
- Perpetuity
- Interoperability
- Flexibility
- Localization: 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.