Open Source Software

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Open Source Software

• Presented by
• Dr. Mohsen Kahani
• http//www.um.ac.ir/kahani/

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Contents

• Introduction
• What is OSS?
• Why OSS?
• OSS Economy and Governance
• Famous OSS Projects
• OSS repository sites
• Conclusion

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Introduction

• Everybody likes free software
• Internet has eased distribution of free Software
• Licensing model for software products
• Commercial
• Shareware
• Open source

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What is OSS?

• Open source doesn't just mean access to the
  source code
• OSS is software distributed under a license which
  meets some criteria in general
• free to redistribute
• source code must be freely available
• modifications and derivative works allowed
• no restrictions on who uses the code
• Most widely used licenses
• GNU General Public License (GPL)
• BSD, MIT X license, etc.

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OSS License(www.opensource.org)

• 1. Free Redistribution
• 2. Source Code
• 3. Derived Works
• 4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code
• 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
• 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
• 7. Distribution of License
• 8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
• 9. The License Must Not Restrict Other Software

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Historical Highlights

• 1979 BSD license
• 1984 ATT commercializes Unix
• 1984 Richard Stallman organizes GNU
• 1984 MIT X
• 1989 GPL
• 1991 Linus Torvalds releases Linux
• 1998 Netscape announces open source
• 98-99 IBM, HP, Oracle, Corel Supports

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Why OSS?

• Quantitative Vs. Qualitative Discussion
• Quantitative Measures
• Market share
• Reliability
• Performance
• Scalability
• Security
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

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Market Share

• Market Share for Top Web Servers, Aug 95 Nov.
  2001

Linux is 2 Web Server OS After Windows (49 vs.
29)
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Reliability

• Of the 50 sites with the highest uptimes
• 92 use Apache
• 50 run on OSS operating systems
• IIS-based sites have more than double offline
  time (on average) than Apache
• Linux is more reliable than Windows NT/2000

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Performance

• Linux/Apache 16-50 faster than NT/IIS
• eWeek Survey
• MySQL equal performance as Oracle, outperforms
  others

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Scalability

• Linux support a wider range of platforms than any
  other OS
• OSS development processes can scale to develop
  large software systems
• Red Hat Linux 7.1, has over 30 million SLOC,
  representing 8,000 person-years or 1 billion

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Security

• Difficult to measure security with numbers
• Attrition.org's survey
• Defaced systems 59 Windows / 21 Linux
• hacker insurance costs 5-15 more for Windows
  vs. Linux
• IIS was attacked 1,400 times more frequently than
  Apache in 2001

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Total Cost of Ownership

• OSS costs less to initially acquire
• OSS often use older hardware more efficiently
• The supporting cost is nearly the same
• 2001 InfoWorld survey
• 32 over 250,000 per year
• 60 over 50,000 per year

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Qualitative Discussion

• Iterative and incremental development
• Potential to revolutionize the entire software
  industry
• No risk of single source solutions
• Greater flexibility
• Platform independency

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Problems (perceived or real)

• Lack of support
• Lower quality software / programmers
• Not ready for enterprise level operations
• Not user friendly
• Missing applications

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Software Economy

• Commercial
• Proprietary control of code allows it to generate
  income, which can be used to compensate
  programmers.
• Greater control in allocation of specific
  resources
• Costs associated with the need for secrecy in
  development of code and for copy protection
  efforts
• Open Source
• Reduced revenues when code is given away
• Reduced costs associated with
• Alumni effect Freely available code gets
  incorporated in teaching activities, which leads
  new generations to adopt the same software,
  reducing downstream training costs. (Unix)
• Customization and bug-fixing Direct external
  benefit associated with parallel development and
  innovation
• Transparency of process and functionality
• Full initiative
• Minimal lock-in

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OSS Governance Issues

• Large open source projects need leadership and
  rules to avoid splintering
• Leadership activities
• Provide a vision of the end result(s) of the
  project
• Assemble a critical mass of initial code to
  demonstrate value of the project and promise for
  the future
• Organize production modules
• Components must be doable and contribute to the
  overall project
• Attract programmers to the project
• Ensure that component modules provide sufficient
  challenge
• Hold project together
• Be able to make hard-nosed decisions about which
  components end up being part of the official
  version of the software
• Governance
• Single strong leader (Torvalds with Linux)
• Governance committee

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OSS Commercial Strategies

• Provision of complementary products and services
• Documentation
• Installation and configuration wizards
• Support
• Provision of expertise in support of open source
  projects
• Intermediation between corporate clients and open
  source community
• Certification
• Conduit to venture capital community
• Example Collab.Net

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OSS Development Strategy

• Release
• Early
• Often

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Who Makes OSS?

• Public Sector
• Everybody should use software generated from
  peoples money (eg. GreenStone Digital Library)
• Big Companies
• Generate income from support (eg. Redhat)
• Control Market, sell other products (eg. IBM)
• Individual freelance programmer
• Altruism
• Becoming famous

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Linux

• Started by Linus Torvalds in 1991 as a UNIX clone
• Several distributions are available Red Hat,
  Debia, Suse, Mandrake
• Red Hat 9 is very reliable, easy to install and
  use
• Special purpose distributions also available

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• Started by patching NCSA HTTPD
• The most widely used web server
• Available for most platforms
• Can be expanded through modules
• Is supported by Apache company

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• The most popular Open Source SQL-based relational
  database
• Fast, multi-threaded
• MySQL vs MySQL Max
• Platform Independent
• Newest version (V4.0) provides most features of
  expensive commercial DBMSs

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• HyperText Pre-Processor
• HTML-embedded scripting language
• Object-Oriented / Syntactically similar to C
• Well suited for Web applications
• Two many utilities/add-ons available
• Makes development process fast and easy

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Other Applications

• Perl
• Python
• PostgreSQL
• LaTeX
• Star Office
• SMTP-BIND-

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OSS future

• High quality office suites available
• More mission-critical applications available
• Clustering / high availability
• Increase in the number of service providers
• Steady increase in the use of Linux

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OSS Repository Sites

• www.sourceforge.net

• www.freshmeat.org

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Some Remarks

• Stick to mature, highly visible OSS products
• Too many alternatives difficult to choose
• Plan for support / education
• More difficult to manage

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Conclusion

• OSS has become a major player in computer
  industry
• OSS seems a better solution in many cases
• Many big organization are using OSS
• OSS options should be carefully considered for
  any project.
• The future looks bright

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Thanks for your Attention