Open Source

Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Before the term open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive retooling of the computing source code. Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, a new, three-word phrase “open source software” was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.

The open source model includes the concept of concurrent yet different agendas and differing approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial software companies. A main principle and practice of open source software development is peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product, source-material, “blueprints” and documentation available at no cost to the public. This is increasingly being applied in other fields of endeavor, such as biotechnology.

Open source software is software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. Examples of open-source software products are:

Programming language

PHP - Scripting language suited for the web

OS

GNU Project — “a sufficient body of free software”

Linux — operating system kernel based on Unix

OpenBSD — operating system derived from Unix

FreeBSD — operating system derived from Unix

OpenSolaris — Unix Operating System from Sun Microsystems

Symbian — real-time mobile operating system

Server

Apache — HTTP web server

Tomcat web server — web container

Mediawiki — wiki server software, the software that runs Wikipedia

Alfresco — content management system

RenovatioCMS — content management system

Joomla — content management system

Drupal — content management system

TYPO3 — content management system

WordPress — blog software

MongoDB — document-oriented, non-relational database

Eclipse — software development environment comprising an integrated development environment (IDE)

Moodle — course management system or virtual learning environment

openSIS — open source Student Information System

Client software

osCommerce — ecommerce

PeaZip — File archiver

Mozilla Firefox — web browser

Mozilla Thunderbird — e-mail client

OpenOffice.org — office suite

Stockfish — chess engine series, considered to be one of the strongest chess programs of the world

7-Zip — File archiver

And many, many more