Open Source Software Development: An Overview

P roprietary software vendors operate on a closed-source model: They develop their own software and release that software to the public with the intention of gaining market penetration and earning a profit. The open source movement, while still profitable in many ways to profit-oriented companies, relies on a different set of practices. In the open source movement, everyone capable of writing code is welcome to join in, a strategy that—according to open source advo-cates—directly leads to more robust software and more diverse business models. While some challenge the general assumptions about the benefits of open source software development , 1 the evidence of popular buy-in cannot be disputed. People everywhere are adopting various open source distributions or participating in the general movement by contributing their own modifications. We offer an overview of open source licensing and development and strive to clarify some of the main principles underlying the resulting software. Because so much has already been written about open source, we seek only to touch on some of its major themes and provide pointers to essential information about the movement and its general licensing structures. a recursive acronym for " GNU's Not Unix " and a homophone for " new. " The GNU Project seeks to develop Unix-compatible software and return software to a state of freedom. Stallman is both an open source evangelist and a major open source contributor as the principal author of the GNU C Compiler (GCC), GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU Emacs, and more. All these packages provide essential tools for GNU/Linux. The Red Hat 7.1 distribution, which collects some 1,016 packages altogether, contains 70 GNU packages. The purpose of the Free Software Foundation is not to ensure distributing software to the end user without cost, but to ensure that the end user can use the software freely. From the Free Software Foundation's perspective , the term " free software " has nothing to do with price: A program is free software if you have the freedom to run the program, modify it to suit your needs, redistribute copies either gratis or for a fee, and distribute modified versions of the program so that the community can benefit from your improvements. Because free refers to freedom, not to price, it is not contradictory to say that software can be both for sale and free simultaneously. According to the Free Software Foundation, the freedom to sell copies …