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7 Kultur, Kommunikation, Medien
| Sprache / Kulturinstitutionen, Archive, Bibliotheken, Museen, Galerien, Ausstellungen / Kulturtheorien, Soziokultur / Presse / Alternativpresse / Gegenöffentlichkeit, Medientheorie / Rundfunk / Fernsehen / Informationsübermittlung / Internet / Open Source / Netzkritik, Netzkultur, Netzkunst / Neitzbewegung, Netzaktivismus / E-Texte, Digitale Texte / Kino / Theater / Musik / Bücher / Verlage, Literatur / Zensur / Kunst / Satire, Humor
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| Systematik: | ID-Archiv EATC id-e-7341 |
| | Status: | Changed | | Checked: | 03-03-02 04:29:15 PM |
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| | Selbstdarstellung: | | Open-source software differs from traditional proprietary software in that the human-readable source-code is made available to the user of the software who can then modify this code in order to fit the software to her specific needs. A source-code is a program of instructions in its original form written by the programmer in a specific computer language, like Fortran, Java, or Basic. An OSS license must allow for user modifications and a derived source code, and must also allow for the software to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. OSS includes many known names that have changed the face of commercial and private computing, such as Linux, BSD Unix, Perl, Apache, and GNU. Today, there are more than 5000 ongoing OSS projects, and the OSS development and products are embraced and supported by firms like IBM, SAP, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard. The history of OSS probably dates back to 1968 when Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet, was founded. Arpanet allowed Ken Thompson, a researcher at Bell Labs and inventor of the operating system Unix, and others, to share and distribute Unix source code freely. Its free distribution made Unix highly popular at universities and research laboratories where users continued to improve and develop new features of the Software. In 1979, AT&T announced plans to commercialize Unix and protect its source code from its users. Reacting to AT&T's move, a software group at the University of California, Berkeley developed a highly usable and successful version of Unix, called Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD Unix). The BSD Unix development was based on the free exchange of software and the voluntary collaboration of several hundred students, professors, and researchers. Around the same time, Eric Allman, a University of California, Berkeley student, developed software for routing messages between computers over Arpanet. Later, this software became known as "Sendmail" and today more than 75 percent of e-mails on the Internet are delivered with this free software. Thus, the free software movement was born. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, legal disputes occurred between free software developers and those corporations who sought to make software proprietary in order to appropriate returns from its development. The legal disputes raised questions regarding what forms of software licenses could best protect the free software from appropriation by single corporations. For example, University of California, Berkeley introduced the BSD license that requires developers to keep the copyright intact and to credit the university in further development work. In 1984, Richard Stallman left MIT's artificial intelligence laboratory to form the Free Software Foundation. Stallman, who developed the first Emacs text editor and founded the GNU (short for GNU's Not Unix) project to develop a free operating system, suggested an alternative form of licensing. Here, he proposed that a user could read and modify the source code of software, but must also agree to distribute alterations and improvements. Until the mid-1980s most of the voluntary projects were aimed at developing software for mainframe computers and terminals. This changed in 1987 however, when Andrew Tannenbaum released a version of the Unix operating system he called "Minix" for use on the Personal Computer. Attempting to exceed the capabilities of Minix, Linus Torvalds released the fundamental source code of a new operating system (often called "kernel") in 1991 under Stallman's proposed license arrangement. Through the voluntary efforts of thousands of programmers from all over the world, Thorvalds' software evolved into the operating system Linux. As a free software with a range of applications, Linux currently attracts users ranging from public administration, to firms and individuals. A number of firms formed and grew in the wake of the Linux popularity. Their businesses have mainly been to provide convenience in services and software distribution. One of these firms is Red Hat. Incorporated in 1995, the firm packages Linux with CD-rom, documentation, third-party applications, and initial technical support, and sells it to the end-user who would otherwise find downloading from the Internet and installation of Linux a cumbersome task. Responding to the increasing popularity of the Internet, in 1995 a group of programmers, now known as the Apache group, constructed a new free Web server called Apache. Based on the National Center for Supercomputing Application's HTTpd 1.3, and a series of other files, Apache is currently one of the most popular web servers on the Internet. While the free software available on the Internet typically grew because of the voluntary, not-for profits efforts of individual programmers and organizations like the Free Software Foundation, more established firms have also contributed their share. In February 1998, Netscape announced that it would give away Communicator 5.0 for free and release this with its source code. In November 1998, Sun Microsystems announced plans to release the source code for Java 2, a version of the popular object-oriented language that is often used for interaction with the Internet. Twenty years after the founding of Arpanet, a group of programmers in the free software community came together to create the term "open source". In order to protect the interest of the OSS community of programmers, the group also started an unincorporated organization, registered a certification mark, and set up the website www.opensource.org. |
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