'Open source' is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. The term is most commonly applied to the
source code of
software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent
intellectual property restrictions. This allows
users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through
collaboration.
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.
[1] Open source culture is one where collective
decisions or
fixations are shared during development and made generally available in the
public domain, as done in
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. Some consider open source as one of various possible design approaches, while others consider it a critical
strategic element of their
operations.
Before the term ''open source'' became popular, developers and producers used various phrases to describe the concept; the term gained popularity with the rise of the
Internet which enabled diverse production models, communication paths and interactive communities.
[2] Later,
open source software became the most prominent face of open source practices.
History
Main articles: Open Source history
Very similar to
open standards, researchers with access to the
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) used a process called
Request for Comments to develop telecommunication network protocols. Characterized by contemporary open source work, this 1960's collaborative process led to the birth of the
Internet in 1969. There are earlier instances of open source movements and free software such as IBM's source releases of its
operating systems in the 1950s and the
SHARE user group that formed to facilitate the exchange of such software.
The "open source" label came out of a strategy session
[History of the OSI. Open Source Initiative. 2006.] 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",
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 its code as open source under the
Netscape Public License and subsequently under the
Mozilla Public License.
[3]
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",
[Open Source Summit Linux Gazette. 1998.] 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 Initiative.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) formed in February 1998 by Raymond and Perens. With about 20 years of evidence from case histories of closed and 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 wanted to bring major software businesses and other high-tech industries into open source. Perens adapted
Debian's Free Software Guidelines to make the
Open Source Definition.
[4]
Critics have said that the term "open source" fosters an ambiguity between the mere availability of the source versus 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.
Society and culture
'Open source culture' is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include
collage,
found footage film,
music, and
appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which
fixations are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations. Informing and inspiring the open source movement are the African call-and-response traditions,
Jazz and the free dance movements which emerged in the 20th Century. Late 20th Century open source strategies include
Fluxus, web jams, Wigglism and the international
Hip Hop culture.
The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a growing tension between creative practices that involve appropriation, and therefore require access to content that is often
copyrighted, and increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing access to copyrighted content. The two main ways in which intellectual property laws became more restrictive in the 20th century were extensions to the term of copyright (particularly in the
United States) and penalties, such as those articulated in the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), placed on attempts to circumvent anti-piracy technologies.
Although artistic appropriation is often permitted under
fair use doctrines, the complexity and ambiguity of these doctrines creates an atmosphere of uncertainty among cultural practitioners. Also, the protective actions of copyright owners create what some call a "
chilling effect" among cultural practitioners.
In the late 20th century, cultural practitioners began to adopt the intellectual property licensing techniques of
free software and
open-source software to make their work more freely available to others, including the
Creative Commons.
The idea of an "open source" culture runs parallel to "
Free Culture," but is substantively different. ''Free culture'' is a term derived from the
free software movement, and in contrast to that vision of culture, proponents of OSC maintain that some intellectual property law needs to exist to protect cultural producers. Yet they propose a more nuanced position than corporations have traditionally sought. Instead of seeing intellectual property law as an expression of instrumental rules intended to uphold either natural rights or desirable outcomes, an argument for OSC takes into account diverse goods (as in "the Good life") and ends.
One way of achieving the goal of making the fixations of cultural work generally available is to maximally utilize technology and
digital media. As predicted by
Moore's law, the cost of digital media and storage plummeted in the late
20th Century. Consequently, the
marginal cost of digitally duplicating anything capable of being transmitted via digital media dropped to near zero. Combined with an explosive growth in
personal computer and technology ownership, the result is an increase in general population's access to digital media. This phenomenon facilitated growth in open source culture because it allowed for rapid and inexpensive duplication and distribution of culture. Where the access to the majority of culture produced prior to the advent of digital media was limited by other constraints of proprietary and potentially "open" mediums, digital media is the latest technology with the potential to increase access to cultural products. Artists and users who choose to distribute their work digitally face none of the physical limitations that traditional cultural producers have been typically faced with. Accordingly, the audience of an open source culture faces little physical cost in acquiring digital media.
Open source culture started as an idea without a name many years before the Internet.
Richard Stallman codified the concept with the creation of the
Free Software Foundation. However, even before Stallman and the Internet, as the public begain to communicate through
Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) like
FidoNet, places like Sourcery Systems BBS where dedicated to providing source code to
Public Domain,
Shareware and
Freeware programs.
Essentially born out of a desire for increased general access to digital media,
the Internet is open source culture's most valuable asset. It is questionable whether the goals of an open source culture could be achieved without the Internet. The global network not only fosters an environment where culture can be generally accessible, but also allows for easy and inexpensive redistribution of culture back into various communities. Some reasons for this are as follows.
First, the Internet allows even greater access to inexpensive digital media and storage. Instead of users being limited to their own facilities and resources, they are granted access to a vast network of facilities and resources, some for free. Sites such as
Archive.org offer up free web space for anyone willing to license their work under a
Creative Commons license. The resulting cultural product is then available to download for free (generally accessible) to anyone with an Internet connection.
Second, users are granted unprecedented access to each other. Older analog technologies such as the
telephone or
television have limitations on the kind of interaction users can have. In the case of television there is little, if any interaction between users participating on the network. And in the case of the telephone, users rarely interact with any more than a couple of their known peers. On the Internet, however, users have the potential to access and meet millions of their peers. This aspect of the Internet facilitates the modification of culture as users are able to collaborate and communicate with each other across international and cultural boundaries. The speed in which digital media travels on the Internet in turn facilitates the redistribution of culture.
Through various technologies such as
peer-to-peer networks and
blogs, cultural producers can take advantage of vast
social networks in order to distribute their products. As opposed to traditional media distribution, redistributing digital media on the Internet can be virtually costless. Technologies such as
BitTorrent and
Gnutella take advantage of various characteristics of the Internet protocol (
TCP/IP) in an attempt to totally decentralize file distribution.
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.
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.
[5]
★ ''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.
[6]
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
OpenSolaris and
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"
[7], created entirely using
open source technology.
Open Source Technology Good Stoves - a movement that each individual or organization /s develop technology for common good with out expecting profit (or patenting). It is an idea to design efficient stoves for the millions using traditional or less efficient biomass stoves, so that these clean stoves if adopted would help in mitigating the Climate change / global warming too. www.goodstove.com
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 to go into production
"The American Revolution" [8]," 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 being produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the non-profit The Fund for Independent Media.
Open Source Cinema is a website to create Basement Tapes, a feature documentary about copyright in the digital age, co-produced by the
National Film Board of Canada.
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.
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.
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 members
[9].
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.
[10]
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 requires a substantial amount of labor. Retaining
intellectual property rights over such works greatly increases the feasibility of obtaining financial compensation which covers the labor costs. The critics 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, and Chuck Connell
answered.
The
Free Software Foundation (FSF) opposes the term “Open Source” being applied to what they refer to as “free software”.
[11] They also oppose the professed pragmatism of the
Open Source Initiative, 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.
[12][11]
Business models
There are a number of commonly recognized barriers to the adoption of open source software by enterprises. These barriers include the perception that open source licenses are viral, lack of formal support and training, the velocity of change, and a lack of a long term roadmap. The majority of these barriers are risk-related. Many business models exist around open source software to provide a 'whole product' to help reduce these risks. The 'whole product' typically includes support, professional services, training, certification, partner programs, references and use cases. These
business models range from 'services only' organisations that do not participate in the development of the software to models where the majority of the software is created by full-time committers that are employed by a central organization. These business models have come into existence recently and their operation is not commonly understood. One model that has been developed to explain this is the
Bee Keeper Model
See also
Notes and references
1. Raymond, Eric S. ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. ed 3.0. 2000.
2. The complexity of such communication relates to Brooks' law, and is 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.
3. Open Source: A Multidisciplinary Approach, , Moreno, Muffatto, Imperial College Press, 2006, 1860946658
4. Perens, Bruce. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly Media. 1999.
5. Berry (2004) Internet Ethics: Privacy, Ethics and Alienation - An Open Source Approach. (PDF file)
6. El-Emam, K (2001). Ethics and Open Source. Empirical Software Engineering 6(4).
7. http://www.elephantsdream.org/
8. "The American Revolution
9. http://www.isca-web.org/english/youth/yource/thenetwork
10. http://www.yogaunity.org
11. Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software
12. Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source”
13. Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software
External links
★
Benkler, Yochai, “Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. Yale Law Journal 112.3 (Dec 2002): p367(78) (in Adobe
pdf format)
★
An open-source shot in the arm? The Economist, Jun 10th 2004,
★
SDForum Distinguished Speaker talks on Open Source Software by Guido van Rossum, Howard Rheingold, and Bruce Perens, 2005.
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