Open-source software

Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite.

It is an explicit "feature" of open source that it puts very few restrictions on the use or distribution by any organization or user, in order to enable the rapid evolution of the software.

"[11] Despite initially accepting it,[12] Richard Stallman of the FSF now flatly opposes the term "Open Source" being applied to what they refer to as "free software".

[15] Raymond likens the development of software by traditional methodologies to building a cathedral, with careful isolated work by individuals or small groups.

[18] This is established by communicating with the OSS community through avenues such as bug reporting and tracking or mailing lists and project pages.

[18] The basic roles OSS participants can fall into multiple categories, beginning with leadership at the center of the project who have control over its execution.

[30] The National Science Foundation established a Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program to support open source innovation.

[32] Industries are likely to use OSS due to back-office functionality, sales support, research and development, software features, quick deployment, portability across platforms and avoidance of commercial license management.

[34] One important legal precedent for open-source software was created in 2008, when the Jacobson v Katzer case enforced terms of the Artistic license, including attribution and identification of modifications.

[34] Ultimately, copyright law became the standard with computer programs being considered a form of literary work, with some tweaks of unique regulation.

[34] However, this has increased the focus on patent rights within these licenses, which has seen backlash from the OSS community, who prefer other forms of IP protection.

[35] The economic model of open-source software can be explained as developers contribute work to projects, creating public benefits.

[35] Furthermore, the innovation of technology creates constantly changing value discussions and outlooks, making economic model unable to predict social behavior.

[24] While many governments are interested in implementing and promoting open-source software due to the many benefits provided, a huge issue to be considered is cybersecurity.

[36] However, these are the broad strokes of the issue, with each country having their own specific politicized interactions with open-source software and their goals for its implementation.

[36] Another issue for governments in regard to open source is their investments in technologies such as operating systems, semiconductors, cloud, and artificial intelligence.

[17] In 1984, he resigned from MIT to create a free operating system, GNU, after the programmer culture in his lab was stifled by proprietary software preventing source code from being shared and improved upon.

[42] IBM, Oracle, and State Farm are just a few of the companies with a serious public stake in today's competitive open source market, marking a significant shift in the corporate philosophy concerning the development of FOSS.

[24] However, some in the community consider them failures in their representation of OSS due to issues such as the downplaying of the OSS center of Android by Google and its partners, the use of an Apache license that allowed forking and resulted in a loss of opportunities for collaboration within Android, the prioritization of convenience over freedom in Ubuntu, and features within Ubuntu that track users for marketing purposes.

[17] For businesses, this can pose a security risk and source of frustration, as they cannot specialize the product to their needs, and there may be hidden threats or information leaks within the software that they cannot access or change.

[44] It is an explicit feature of open source that it puts very few restrictions on the use or distribution by any organization or user, in order to enable the rapid evolution of the software.

[13] He believes that the main difference is that by choosing one term over the other lets others know about what one's goals are: development (open source) or a social stance (free software).

[48] Open sourcing can be beneficial in multiple ways, such as attracting more external contributors who bring new perspectives and problem solving capabilities.

[51] In 2021, the countries with the highest open source software contributions included the United States, China, Germany, India, and the UK, in that order.

[51] For instance, Information and communication technology participation, population, wealth and proportion of access to the internet have been shown to be correlated with OSS contributions.

[38] Open source software projects are built and maintained by a network of programmers, who may often be volunteers, and are widely used in free as well as commercial products.

[24] As BSD was focused on increasing functionality, it would publicly share its greatest innovations with the main Unix operating system.

[24] The idea was to create a Unix alternative operating system that would be available for anyone to use and allow programmers to share code freely between them.

[24] The Apache license allowed permitted members to directly access source code, a marked difference from GNU and Linux's approaches.

[58][3] This "culture" or ideology takes the view that the principles apply more generally to facilitate concurrent input of different agendas, approaches, and priorities, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial companies.