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Demystifying Open Source
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| In 2008, the open source community saw the
| year end with a headline-catching lawsuit, the
| Free Software Foundation files suit against
| Cisco for General Public License (GPL)
| violations. Not to be outdone, 2009 also ended
| with a bang. Best Buy, Samsung, JVC and 11
| other consumer electronics companies were
| named in a copyright infringement lawsuit
| filed on December 14, 2009, by the Software
| Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of the
| Software Freedom Conservancy. The scope of
| this lawsuit is unprecedented as it includes
| 14 defendants.
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http://opensource.sys-con.com/node/1250606/print
Recent:
A Concise Introduction to Free and Open Source Software
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| Abstract: In the early days of information
| technology (IT), computers were delivered
| with operating systems and basic application
| software already installed, without
| additional cost, and in editable (source
| code) form. But as software emerged as a
| stand-alone product, the independent
| software vendors (ISVs) that were launched
| to take advantage of this commercial
| opportunity no longer delivered source code,
| in order to prevent competitors from gaining
| access to their trade secrets. The practice
| also had the (intended) result that computer
| users became dependent on their ISVs for
| support and upgrades. Due to the
| increasingly substantial investments
| computer users made in application software,
| they also became "locked in" to their
| hardware and software vendors' products,
| because of the high cost of abandoning, or
| reconfiguring, their existing application
| software to run on the proprietary operating
| system of a new vendor. In response, a
| movement in support of "free software"
| (i.e., programs accompanied both by source
| code as well as the legal right to modify,
| share and distribute that code) emerged in
| the mid 1980s. The early proponents of free
| software regarded the right to share source
| code as an essential freedom, but a later
| faction focused only on the practical
| advantages of freely sharable code, which
| they called "open source." Concurrently, the
| Internet enabled a highly distributed model
| of software development to become pervasive,
| based upon voluntary code contributions and
| globally collaborative efforts. The combined
| force of these developments resulted in the
| rapid proliferation of "free and open source
| software" (FOSS) development projects that
| have created many "best of breed" operating
| system and application software products,
| such that the economic importance of FOSS
| has now become very substantial. In this
| article, I trace the origins and theories of
| the free software and open source movements,
| the complicated legal implications of FOSS
| development and use, and the supporting
| infrastructural ecosystem that has grown up
| to support this increasingly vital component
| of our modern, IT based society.
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http://www.consortiuminfo.org/bulletins/aug09.php#feature
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