What Is Open Source Software
What is Free Open Source Software?
The central thought of free open source begins with freedom of information. Among the first and one of the strongest proponents of free open source software is Richard Stallings of The Free Software Foundation. Richard Stalling was raised and employeed in an environment of proprietary closed source (encrypted) software. He among other professional programmers were frequently stymied by buggy software that he was powerless to try to fix, improve or "debug".
This lead to the thought process that all software should be maintainable and fixable by the end user. So the initial idea behind "free software" refers to freedom to examine the computer programs and to fix or improve the code where necessary. This developed into a computer program "Freedom of Information Act" of sorts. The licensing of these programs is that the source code must be included with the software, not-encrypted, and modifiable by the end user/developer.
This does not mean that "free open source software" has to be "free of charge." In fact, Richard Stalling and a number others make this very clear that what they mean is freedom of information, access to the code source and the freedom to modify the source as seen fit by the end user/developer. There has been a substantial culture that has grown up around this principle and a very large number of these programs are in fact also "free of charge.
There was a nice summary of free open source software published in the the British Medical Journal, October 21, 2000. (BMJ 2000;321:976) This was titled Medical Software's Free Future. The article summarizes how free open source software has potential advantages over proprietary software.
Proprietary software comes with some built problems that has caused trouble for most of us in business over the last 40 years. The ones that seem to top the list were summarized by Ignacio Valdes, MD, MD in Linux Medical News:
- Sunsetting, corporate buy-outs, bankruptcy, patient outliving their software.
- Mobile workforce: 1 doctor 5 practice settings 5 different EMR GUI's in 1 week. Training, re-training, re-re-training.
- Disaster preparedness (see item 2 above).
- Vendor lock-in.
- Duplication of engineering costs.
- Meta-applications built on substrate without asking permission: simulators, bio-surveillance, yet-to-be-conceived apps.
- Ensuring confidentiality.
- Software forensics in the case of malfeasance.
- Error reduction studies and engineering in a proprietary software mosaic.
- No one vendor with enough engineering resources.
- Corporate agenda not in harmony with customer needs.
Open Source can deal with all of the problems in a way that proprietary software either cannot deal with at all or only poorly. One of the biggest problems is the obsolescence of programs. Software becomes obsolescent for a variety of reasons. Certainly corporate buy-outs and bankruptcy can cause a business administrator to have nightmares.
By its nature, open source software is developed in a multicentric fashion. Many programs are developed where there are multiple programmers on different continents. This multicentric nature makes open source highly resistant to these types of problems. Even natural disasters wiping out several countries at a time. This allows a particular open source program to survive challenges that are simply inconceivable to the majority of proprietary software firms.
Legal Aspects of Open Source Software
Medical Software's Free Future - British Medical Journal
