Open-source software movement
Programmers who support the open-source-movement philosophy contribute to the open-source community by voluntarily writing and exchanging programming code for software development.
These goals promote the production of high-quality programs as well as working cooperatively with other similarly-minded people to improve open-source technology.
[2] The label open source was created and adopted by a group of people in the free software movement at a strategy session[4] held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source-code release for Navigator.
[8] Stallman is regarded within the open-source community as sharing a key role in the conceptualization of freely-shared source code for software development.
For example, the scope of "implied license" conjecture remains unclear and can compromise an enterprise's ability to patent productions made with open-source software.
In the court case "Jacobsen v. Katzer", the plaintiff sued the defendant for failing to put the required attribution notices in his modified version of the software, thereby violating license.
The defendant claimed Artistic License in not adhering to the conditions of the software's use, but the wording of the attribution notice decided that this was not the case.
International Free and Open Source Software Law Review offers peer-reviewed information for lawyers on free-software issues.
The OSI was founded by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens in February 1998 with the purpose of providing general education and advocacy of the open-source label through the creation of the Open Source Definition that was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
[6] In February 1998, the open-source movement was adopted, formalized, and spearheaded by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), an organization formed to market software "as something more amenable to commercial business use"[3] The OSI applied to register "Open Source" with the US Patent and Trademark Office, but was denied due to the term being generic and/or descriptive.
[13] The open-source label was conceived at a strategy session that was held on February 3, 1998 in Palo Alto, California and on April 8 of the same year, the attendees of Tim O’Reilly's Free Software Summit voted to promote the use of the term open source.
[3] The rhetorical discourse used in open-source movements is now being broadened to include a larger group of non-expert users as well as advocacy organizations.
[14] The factors affecting the open-source movement's legal formalization are primarily based on recent political discussion over copyright, appropriation, and intellectual property.
[16] The center of the onion consists of the core contributors who drive the project forward through large amounts of code and software design choices.
The authors then suggest that GitHub, as a tool, can aid in this process by supporting "checkbox" features on a team's open-source project that urge contributors to take part in these activities.
David Nalley, president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), emphasized that maintaining legacy code is often unappealing to younger developers, who prefer to work on new and innovative projects.
[21] While contributing to open source projects can provide valuable experience in development, documentation, internationalization, and other areas, barriers to entry often make it difficult for newcomers, particularly younger individuals, to get involved.
The LFX Mentorship Program also seeks to sponsor and mentor the next generation of open source developers and leaders across various projects.
[23] With the growth and attention on the open-source movement, the reasons and motivations of programmers for creating code for free has been under investigation.
In a 2006 study for the European Union on free and open-source software communities, researchers found that only 1.5% of all contributors are female.
[30] There are initiatives such as Outreachy that aim to support more women and other underrepresented gender identities to participate in open-source software.
[31] Many projects have adopted the Contributor Covenant code of conduct in an attempt to address concerns of harassment of minority developers.
Although there are security setbacks to this idea due to the fact that anyone has access to change the software, the advantages can outweigh the disadvantages.
[citation needed] "For educators, The Open Source Movement allowed access to software that could be used in teaching students how to apply the theories they were learning".
Open source in healthcare — Created in June 2009 by the nonprofit eHealthNigeria, the open-source software OpenMRS is used to document health care in Nigeria.
[41] The impact of open source in healthcare is also observed by Apelon Inc, the "leading provider of terminology and data interoperability solutions".
Not only does open source benefit healthcare economically, but the lesser dependence on proprietary software allows for easier integration of various systems, regardless of the developer.
[43] From a citation, it wasn't until IBM was challenged by the evolving competitive market, specifically from Microsoft, that they decided to invest their resources more into open source software.
The company's anti-open-source sentiment was enforced by former CEO Steve Ballmer, who referred to Linux, a widely used open-source software, as a "cancer that attaches itself ... to everything it touches.
Specifically they had withheld inter-operability information with the open-source Samba (software) project, which can be run on many platforms and aims to "removing barriers to interoperability".
