Open Source Software
How would you feel if you could do absolutely anything you wanted to with your software and distribute it legally to as many people as you wanted? How would you feel if you could get a program for free or a fraction of the cost of applications like Adobe Photoshop, or Microsoft Office? This is possible with open-source software. The term "open-source" is defined to describe software, which is available to the public in source code form that does not have licensing restrictions, which limit use, modification, or redistribution. The etymology stems of the word "open" comes from the Proto-Germanic term "upana" which means "raised up." The word "source" comes from the Old French term "sourse" which means "to rise, or spring up." Teams of programmers scattered around the world typically develop open-source software, but universities, government agencies, and corporations like IBM also develop it. Why is open-source software good for consumers, corporations, and even students? Teachers and students have full access to the internals of the program, which allow them to find out how a program works and helps the learning process of programming in general. Corporations and home users don't have to wait for just one s
Exactly how did open-source software get started? In the 1970's, the success of proprietary operating systems, particularly UNIX, created frustration in the academic community, who could not use these systems for study or teaching. This situation motivated Richard Stallman to found the Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org) in 1985. This project produced open-source utilities and applications, but its fundamental goal was to create a free operating system. In 1991, the world was still without a functional operating system that was available for teaching. The same year, Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helinski in Finland, began working on a UNIX-compatible operating system that he made from scratch called Linux. After he developed version 0.02 of the operating system, he posted on a newsgroup on the Internet stating what his project was about, and it quickly attracted the interest of many skilled programmers around the world. Linux is also very scaleable, which means it can be ported to many different hardware platforms such as a personal handheld device or even a watch. Linux is now used by many corporations saving them millions of dollars in some cases since there are no licensing costs and Linux is estimated to be used by eighteen million people around the world. "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," denounced Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive of Microsoft, as he stated in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. Despite Microsoft's criticism, servers for the company's Hotmail e-mail service use FreeBSD for the server platform. FreeBSD is another open-source operating system developed Berkeley University in California
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Approximate Word count = 1148
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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