Introduction To Open Source Software (OSS) Technology

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Chapter 1.0

1.1.1 Open Source Software (OSS)

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•The pioneers of open source software are Richard Stallman and the GNU project.

•"Four Freedoms" essential to software as:i. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom

1).

ii. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 2).

iii. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 3).

iv.The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 4).

1.1.2 History of open source

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• In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project to write a complete operating system free from constraints on use of its source code.

• In 1989, the first version of the GNU General Public License was published. A slightly updated version 2 was published in 1991.

• In 1989, some GNU developers formed the company Cygnus Solutions.

• The Linux kernel, started by Linus Torvalds, was released as freely modifiable source code in 1991.

• The BSD lawsuit was settled out of court in 1993, FreeBSD and NetBSD (both derived from 386BSD).

1.1.2 History of open source

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• KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich. At the time, he was troubled by the inconsistencies in UNIX applications.

• In 1997, Eric Raymond published The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a reflective analysis of the hacker community and free software principles. The paper received significant attention in early 1998 and was one factor in motivating Netscape Communications Corporation to release their popular Netscape Communicator Internet suite as free software. This code is today better known as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

• In August 1999, Sun Microsystems released the StarOffice office suite as free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The free software version was renamed OpenOffice.org, and coexists with StarOffice.

1.1.3 VARIOUS OSS WEB RESOURCE

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a. OSS Websites• http://www.oscc.org.my/b. OSS Repository• http://mirror.oscc.org.myc. Mailing List• http://www.opensource.org/lists• http://lists.oscc.org.my/mailman/listinfod. Forum• http://www.linuxforums.org/

PART 1

1.1.4 OPEN STANDARDSAn open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has

various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed (e.g. open process).

The terms "open" and "standard" have a wide range of meanings associated with their usage. There are a number of definitions of open standards which emphasize different aspects of openness, including of the resulting specification, the openness of the drafting process, and the ownership of rights in the standard.

The term "standard" is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis6

The rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the IETF, ISO, IEC, and ITU-T permit their standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees.

Among these organizations, only the IETF and ITU-T explicitly refer to their standards as "open standards," while the others refer only to producing "standards."

The IETF and ITU-T use definitions of "open standard" that allow "reasonable and non-discriminatory" patent licensing fee requirements.

The term "open standard" is sometimes coupled with "open source" with the idea that a standard is not truly open if it does not have a complete free/open source reference implementation available.7

1.1.4 OPEN STANDARDS

1.1.5 PRINCIPLES OF OPEN STANDARDS

i. Availability Open Standards are available for all to read and implement.

ii. Maximize End-User Choice Open Standards create a fair, competitive market for implementations

of the standard. They do not lock the customer in to a particular vendor or group.

iii. No Royalty Open Standards are free for all to implement, with no royalty or fee. Certification of compliance by the standards organization may involve a fee.

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1.1.5 PRINCIPLES OF OPEN STANDARDS

iv. No Discrimination Open Standards and the organizations that administer them do not

favor one implementor over another for any reason other than the technical standards compliance of a vendor's implementation. Certification organizations must provide a path for low and zero-cost implementations to be validated, but may also provide enhanced certification services.

v. Extension or Subset Implementations of Open Standards may be extended, or offered in

subset form. However, certification organizations may decline to certify subset implementations, and may place requirements upon extensions (see Predatory Practices). 9

vi. Predatory Practices

Open Standards may employ license terms that protect against subversion of the standard by embrace-and-extend tactics. The licenses attached to the standard may require the publication of reference information for extensions, and a license for all others to create, distribute, and sell software that is compatible with the extensions. An Open Standard may not othewise prohibit extensions.

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1.1.5 PRINCIPLES OF OPEN STANDARDS

1.1.6 EXAMPLES OF OPEN STANDARS

i. System World Wide Web architecture specified by W3C ii. Hardware Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) (a specification by IBM for

plug-in boards to IBM-architecture PCs, later standardized by the IEEE)

Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) (a specification by Intel Corporation for plug-in boards to IBM-architecture PCs)

Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) (a specification by Intel Corporation for plug-in boards to IBM-architecture PCs)

PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) (an industry consortium developing Open Standards specifications for computer architectures ) 11

1.1.6 EXAMPLES OF OPEN STANDARS

iii. File formats Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) (file format for 2D vector graphics,

raster graphics, and text defined by ISO/IEC 8632) Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Extensible HTML (XHTML) and

HTML5 (specifications of the W3C for structured hyperlinked document formatting)

Portable Document Format (PDF/X) (a specification by Adobe Systems Incorporated for formatted documents, later approved by ISO as ISO 15930-1:2001 [28])

OpenDocument Format (ODF) (a specification by OASIS for office document formats, approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 26300)

Office Open XML (a specification by Microsoft for document, spreadsheet and presentation formats, approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 29500 and Ecma as ECMA-376)

Portable Network Graphics (PNG) (a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression, approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 15948:2004)

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1.1.6 EXAMPLES OF OPEN STANDARS

iv. Protocols

Internet Protocol (IP) (a specification of the IETF for transmitting packets of data on a network - specifically, IETF RFC 791)

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) (a specification of the IETF for implementing streams of data on top of IP - specifically, IETF RFC 793)

XMPP - an open protocol for near-real-time instant messaging (IM) and presence information (a.k.a. buddy lists)

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1.1.6 EXAMPLES OF OPEN STANDARSv. Programming languages

ANSI C (a general-purpose programming language, approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 9899)

Ada (a multi-paradigm programming language, defined by joint ISO/ANSI standard (ISO-8652:1995), combined with major Amendment ISO/IEC 8652:1995/Amd 1:2007)

MUMPS (a dynamically typed programming language, originally designed for database-driven applications in the healthcare industry approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 11756:1992 and ISO/IEC 11756:1999)

C# (a general-purpose programming language, approved by ISO as ISO/IEC 23270 and ECMA as ECMA-334)

14 PART 2

1.1.7 OSS LICENSES

a) Academic Licenses are available to accredited educational institutions, including vocational/trade schools, colleges, universities and institutions, and to individual students and teaching staff. Academic Licenses allow for use of fully-functional version of the software for non-commercial purposes only, including education and research.

Software provided under an academic license is essentially a "gift." You may use it unencumbered and may relicense your derivative work under a new license of your own choosing.

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The BSD license is an academic license, as is the Apache Software License and the MIT License. The latter is especially concise and yet exemplifies academic licenses (the warranty clause of the MIT License and any discussion about software warranties have been omitted for the sake of brevity):

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1.1.7 OSS LICENSES

An excerpt from the MIT License

Copyright (c) year, copyright holdersPermission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

1.1.7 OSS LICENSES

b) Community Licenses are designed for organizations which are: non-profit, non-government, non-academic, non-commercial, non-political and secular

Community Licenses applies to any original work of authorship (the "Original Work") whose owner (the "Licensor") has placed the following notice immediately following the copyright notice for the Original Work:

Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>

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c) Companies Licenses is as Commercial Licenses, it available to legal entities, including companies and organizations (both for-profit and non-profit), requiring the software for general commercial use. Commercial Licenses that are registered in a legal entity name allow for use of the software on any computer, operating system, and by any developer within a legal entity, provided that the total number of concurrent users never exceeds the number of purchased licenses.

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1.1.7 OSS LICENSES

1.1.8 VARIOUS OSI CERTIFIED OSS LICENSES

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a. LGPL(GNU Lesser General Public License)• is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It

was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License.

• The GNU Library General Public License (as the LGPL was originally named) was published in 1991, and was the version number 2 for parity with GPL version 2. The LGPL was revised in minor ways in the 2.1 point release, published in 1999, when it was renamed the GNU Lesser General Public License. Version 3 of the LGPL was published in 2007 as a list of additional permissions applied to GPL version 3.

b. BSD (Berkeley Software Distribute License)• This is the licence applied to the software distributions of the Computer

Science Research Group, of the University of California at Berkeley. • It is a good example of a ``permissive'' licence, which imposes almost no

conditions on what a user can do with the software, including charging clients for binary distributions, with no obligation to include source code.

1.1.8 VARIOUS OSI CERTIFIED OSS LICENSES

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c. MIT License• The MIT License is a free software license originating at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (MIT), used by the MIT X Consortium.• It is a permissive license, meaning that it permits reuse within proprietary

software on the condition that the license is distributed with that software. The license is also GPL-compatible, meaning that the GPL permits combination and redistribution with software that uses the MIT License.

d. Mozila License• This is the licence made by Netscape to distribute the code of Mozilla, the

new version of it network navigator. It is in many respects similar to the GPL, but perhaps more ``enterprise oriented''.

PART 3

1.2.1 APPLICATION SOFTWARE IN OSS

a) Presentation• Impressive• Pointless• MagicPoint• Kpresenter• UltraPoint• PinPoint

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1.2.1 APPLICATION SOFTWARE IN OSS

b) Database c-tree Plus Empress Essentia FairCom

Server INFORMIX-

SE Just

Logic/SQL KE Texpress22

•Qddb

•Raima Database Manager++

•Empress Embedded RDBMS

•SOLID Server

•Velocis Database Server

•Yard SQL

1.2.1 APPLICATION SOFTWARE IN OSS

c) Email Thunderbird Spicebird Zimbra Eudora ClawsMail Sylpheed

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Mozil la ThunderbirdIt is an e-mail and news cross-platform client software

package by Mozilla Foundation. Thunderbird can manage multiple e-mail, newsgroup and RSS accounts and supports multiple identities within accounts.

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Claws Mail

Claws Mail is a free, GTK+-based, open source email and news client. It is very light lightweight. Claws Mail runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Unix-like systems such as Linux, BSD, and Solaris.

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Spicebird

Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application.

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Zimbra

Zimbra is a client and server platform for messaging and collaboration. The web client integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, VoIP, and online document authoring in a rich browser-based interface.

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Sylpheed

Sylpheed is a free, GTK+-based, open source email and news client. It is very light lightweight. Sylpheedruns on Windows, Mac OS X and Unix-like systems such as Linux, and BSD.

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1.2.1 APPLICATION SOFTWARE IN OSS

d) Graphics GIMP Inkscape Digikam K-3D Jpatch Bryce

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1.2.1 APPLICATION SOFTWARE IN OSS

e) Animation IDL (Interactive Data Language) Megahedron Tecplot 7.0 VariCAD VARKON XVScan

30 PART 4