Open Source Software
Staff Article, written by Don Wilde
It used to be that 'leverage' meant OPM, OPT, and OPI: Other Peoples' Money, Other Peoples' Time, and Other Peoples' Influence. Those are still valid ways to grow your value and worth to employers and customers, but there is now a new rising star in the world of leverage: OPS, Other Peoples' Software,
Other Peoples' Software can help you begin a business in days, or grow one in new directions with minimal investment that will yield manifold returns.
A Short History of the Open Source Movement
The Open Source movement started around 1970 when the developers of a new operating system at Bell Labs started handing out tapes of their new operating system and C language compiler to anyone with a computer. There weren't many computers then, but since the tapes contained the complete source code of everything included, it was relatively easy to get the systems running on almost any hardware machine. Universities and government agencies all over the world started using, and equally importantly, adding functionality to the software.
The 'birth crisis' of Open Source occurred when AT&T, owner of Bell Labs, tried to pull back the ownership of the software after the U.S. Federal Government broke their monolithic telephone system into small chunks and drastically reduced their corporate revenues. One university, the University of California at Berkeley, cried foul and filed a lawsuit to keep the code freely available. UCB students and faculty had invested thousands of hours into the code, and had developed many innovative new utilities and features.
The lawsuit was bitterly contested, but finally resolved. Everything developed before 1994 was declared by a judge to be open, and everything developed after that was AT&T's property. In many peoples' opinion, AT&T hadn't added much of universal value to the code after that point, so the decision was widely considered a win for the University, but AT&T also claimed victory and promptly signed up several major computer corporations as licensees of their operating system with the name they owned as a trademark.
The Berkeley version of the code was made completely clean and once again available, and became the core of numerous operating systems, each of which has maintained the tradition of Open Source, releasing their source code with an unconditional right to copy, modify and use the code freely under the Berkeley Software Development license (BSD license), The FreeBSD Project -- which the server that runs this web system runs on -- focused on maximum performance as a server on the Intel x86 architecture, NetBSD and OpenBSD focused on portability to new architectures and on ultimate security, respectively.
The fight over open source created opportunity for two new developments. Bill Gates made a killing with his new windowing operating system on the new Personal Computers, even though it was sadly deficient performance-wise to the high performance X Window System that had been freely available, and Linus Torvalds, frustrated at that deficiency, created the beginings of his Linux operating system and licensed it with Richard Stallman's innovative GNU Public License, a new twist on copyright that made code free to use, but only if the users also made their improvements open source. Stallman, the creator of the EMACS editing system, began promoting his "Copyleft" in 1983 with the beginnings of the GNU project.
These two developments spawned the explosion of the open source movement into what it is today. The mass production and 'cloning' of personal computers has driven their price down to an incredible value and multiplied their capabilities to an astonishing level few would have dreamed of twenty years ago. The success of Linux and its growth under the GPL has spawned literally thousands of other projects, some using the GPL and others released completely without restriction under the BSD license.The FreeBSD Ports Collection contains over 20,000 packages -- almost all with complete source code -- which have been adapted to run on the operating system.
Open Source Software is here to stay, and many people from independent businessmen to large corporations are taking advantage of it. Take, for example, Yahoo!, an early advocate and supporter of FreeBSD, which extended the code of the operating system to build what was then the premier search engine. Apple Computer, which built its Mac OS X on a combination of freely available code from Carnegie Mellon University, FreeBSD, and NetBSD, has leapt into serious competition with Microsoft's hardware allies for sales of new personal computers in large part because of the well-developed and stable operating system software it is based upon. Sun Microsystems has been quietly acquiring licensing rights to open source systems like MySQL and OpenOffice.org, leaving the code free but applying their logo to the project pages. Massive IBM has also embraced Open Source, building a ton of enterprise-level applications and frameworks on open source software. Dell sells thousands of laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. Of the models that are available with Linux, it is reputed that over fifteen percent now are sold with Ubuntu and the computer manufacturer has even created a rapidly-booting, low power Linux machine as a feature of their business laptop lines. Open Source is growing by leaps and bounds, and mighty Microsoft, seeing the writing on the wall, is scrambling to create or acquire new lines of business.
The Opportunity Today
Open Source operating systems like FreeBSD and Linux can outshine Microsoft's windowing system on today's PC's and especially servers, and the wealth of freely available open source applications enables business owners to rapidly grow their capabilities. Linux, particularly Ubuntu, is easy enough to use to become a complete desktop replacement for most users. Almost every kind of software is now available in free open source variants, with only a few proprietary applications remaining untouched. Even these are now runnable on Linux and FreeBSD hosts using the remarkable and rapidly improving WINE emulator.
Even more than desktops, though, the opportunity for businesses to leverage open source software is far greater in the server arena.
This Company Runs on Open Source
Engineering Job Future's web presence was completely assembled from open source:
- FreeBSD operating system (BSD license)
- Sendmail mail daemon (GPL-like license)
- Apache Web Server (BSD-like license)
- GNU C compiler (GNU Public License)
- Perl interpreted computer language (GPL/ GNU Artistic license)
- Ruby interpreted computer language (GPL)
- PHP interpreted computer language (GNU Public License)
- MySQL database management system (GPL)
- CMS Made Simple Content Management System (GPL)
- phpBB Forum software (GNU Public License)
- ImageMagick image manipulation software (BSD-like license)
... and many other Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) packages as well. Every one of these is available both as source code and as pre-compiled binary packages with FreeBSD, so installation is simple. At the time of this writing, less than ten days have elapsed from the conception of the company and the site is fully operational.
In future articles, I'll discuss ways that people who have not specialized in software development can also leverage OPS to their advantage. Nothing I did to set up http://www.EngineeringJobFuture.com was technically difficult or even sophisticated, because the brainwork I relied upon was that of other brilliant developers who came before me.