Tech it or Leave it: Open Source

[Welcome to Tech it or Leave it, your no nonsense, neatly explained tech post which makes rocket science sound as simple as David and Goliath]

Open Source
Derick Mathew

Open Source this and Open Source that, we hear about Open Source every other day. This concept that once sounded so distant has swept over us and the world on a whole. We use open source products almost every day with or without our knowledge. Although most people most readily link Open source to the usage of operating systems such as Linux, the most commonly used Open Source product is still (Surprise Surprise!!!) the Internet, the very thing that helped boost the use of the open source philosophy.

In the simplest of terms Open Source is nothing but an approach under which the original work of a person can be put forward to the public such that the users can use, modify and distribute the software (in either modified or unmodified form). Open Source is quite common in many fields though it is heard of prominently within software circles. Any software that is declared as Open Source is also known as Open Source Software (OSS). It is seen as a offshoot of the free software marketing campaign though many people see Open Source as a method of developing code whereas Free Software is seen as a social movement.

Open source software is usually considered to be software that is freely available with its source code (a collection of instructions that programmers type out to create their programs which help make the softwares that we use), but there are other factors that make software truly open source. A particular software license is said to be considered to be open source if it follows the rules, called the Open Source Definition, set by the “Open Source Initiative”, an organization that promotes OSS. The rules are listed below and seem quite simple

1. The software should be freely redistributable, without royalty or fee (*Gasp*)
2. The source code must be distributed,(and NO it cannot be made impossible to read on purpose)
3. The software should be modifiable
4. The license must not stop people, groups or a particular field from using the product
5. The license cannot restrict other software

Only a few of the rules are listed here. For the full list of rules in detail you can visit “http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php”

An important point to be noted is that “Not all that is free is open source and not all that is open source is free”.

Open source if used in the right manner can help make reliable, high quality software at a fast pace rather inexpensively and the same software can be expanded and made more flexible. But as Uncle Ben (from “Spiderman” the movie) once said “With great power comes great responsibility”. The softwares made with open source can be used by hackers (the evil kind), that is they can deliberately put in weaknesses and loopholes in the software they deliver.

But all in all Open source has a lot to offer. We shall get to see more of that in the next post. J




Derick is a die hard computer freak and usually a nice guy, with a very special variety of humour, the frequency of which increases when he comes to the youth league meetings. He belongs to Mar Thoma Syrian Church, Primrose Road Bangalore.He also makes pretty power point slides for praise and worship sessions.



Picture courtesy:
1. open source: the_student [IMG]http://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l93/the_student/open_source_button.png[/IMG]