Open source vs. closed source
Encyclopedia
Open source
- the source availability model used by free and open source software
(FOSS) - and closed source are two approaches to the distribution of software.
executable state, which is what the market is allowed access to. Microsoft
, the owner and developer of Windows
and Microsoft Office
, along with other major software companies, have long been proponents of this business model. Although in August 2010, Microsoft interoperability general manager Jean Paoli said Microsoft "loves open source" and its anti-open source position was a mistake.
The FOSS
model allows for able users to view and modify a product's source code. Common advantages cited by proponents for having such a structure are expressed in terms of trust, acceptance, teamwork and quality.
A non-free license is used to limit what free software movement
advocates consider to be the essential freedoms. A license, whether providing open source
code or not, that does not stipulate the "four software freedoms", are not considered "free" by the free software movement. A closed source license is one that limits only the availability of the source code. By contrast a copyleft
license claims to protect the "four software freedoms" by explicitly granting them and then explicitly prohibiting anyone to redistribute the package or reuse the code in it to make derivative works without including the same licensing clauses. Some licenses grant the four software freedoms but allow redistributors to remove them if they wish. Such licenses are sometimes called permissive software licenses. An example of such a license is the FreeBSD License which allows derivative software to be distributed as non-free or closed source, as long as they give credit to the original designers.
FOSS can and has been commercialized by companies such as Red Hat
, IBM
, Novell
, Oracle
, Mozilla Foundation
, VMware
and others.
on a product that is otherwise very easy to copy and redistribute. The end result is that an end-user is not actually purchasing software, but purchasing the right to use the software. To this end, the source code to closed-source software is considered a trade secret by its manufacturers.
are such companies that give its software away freely, but charge for support services. The source code
of the software is usually given away, and pre-compiled binary software frequently accompanies it for convenience. As a result, the source code can be freely modified. However, there can be some license-based restrictions on re-distributing the software. Generally, software can be modified and re-distributed for free, as long as credit is given to the original manufacturer of the software. In addition, FOSS can generally be sold commercially, as long as the source-code is provided. There are a wide variety of free software licenses that define how a program can be used, modified, and sold commercially (see GPL
, LGPL
, and BSD-type licenses
). FOSS may also be funded through donations.
community. There are numerous GNU/Linux distribution
s available, but a great many of them are simply modified versions of some previous version. For example, Fedora Linux, Mandriva Linux
, and PCLinuxOS
are all derivatives of an earlier product, Red Hat Linux
. In fact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
is itself a derivative of Fedora Linux. This is an example of one vendor creating a product, allowing a third-party to modify the software, and then creating a tertiary product based on the modified version. All of the products listed above are currently produced by software service companies.
Operating systems built on the Linux kernel
are available for a wider range of processor architectures than Microsoft Windows
, including PowerPC
and SPARC
. None of these can match the sheer popularity of the x86 architecture, nevertheless they do have significant numbers of users; Windows remains unavailable for these alternative architectures, although there have been such ports of it in the past.
The most obvious complaint against FOSS revolves around the fact that making money through some traditional methods, such as the sale of the use of individual copies and patent
royalty
payments, is much more difficult and sometimes impractical with FOSS. Moreover, many see the introduction of FOSS as damaging to the market for commercial software. Most software development companies sell licenses to use individual copies of software as their primary source of income, using a combination of trade secret
s and copyright
, patent
, and trademark
laws (collectively called intellectual property rights laws). Fees from sale and licensing of commercial software are the primary source of income for companies that sell software.
Open source software has a large number of alternative funding streams, which are actually better-connected to the real costs of creating and maintaining software. After all, the cost of making a copy of a software program is essentially zero, so per-use fees are perhaps unreasonable. At one time, open-source software development was almost entirely volunteer-driven, and although this is true for many small projects, many alternative funding streams have been identified and employed for FOSS:
Increasingly, FOSS is developed by commercial organizations. In 2004, Andrew Morton
noted that 37,000 of the 38,000 recent patches in the Linux kernel
were created by developers directly paid to develop the Linux kernel. Many projects, such as the X Window System and Apache, have had commercial development as a primary source of improvements since their inception. This trend has accelerated over time.
There are some who counter that the commercialization of FOSS is a poorly devised business model because commercial FOSS companies answer to parties with opposite agendas. On one hand commercial FOSS companies answer to volunteers developers, who are difficult to keep on a schedule, and on the other hand they answer to shareholders, who are expecting a return on their investment. Often FOSS development is not on a schedule and therefore it may have an adverse effect on a commercial FOSS company releasing software on time.
counters this claim by saying that quantifying who or what is innovative is impossible.
The implementation of compatible FOSS replacements for proprietary software is encouraged by the Free Software Foundation
to make it possible for their users to use FOSS instead of proprietary software, for example they have been listed GNU Octave
, an API-compatible replacement for MATLAB
, as one of their high priority projects, in the past this list contained free binary compatible Java and CLI implementations, like GNU Classpath
and DotGNU
. Thus even “derivative” developments are important in the opinion of many people from FOSS. However, there is no quantitative analysis, if FOSS is less innovative than proprietary software, since there are derivative/reimplementing proprietary developments, too.
Some of the largest well-known FOSS projects are either legacy code (e.g., FreeBSD or Apache) developed a long time ago independently of the free software movement
, or by companies like Netscape
(which open-sourced its code with the hope that they can compete better), or by companies like MySQL
which use FOSS to lure customers for its more expensive licensed product. However, it is notable that most of these projects have seen major or even complete rewrites
(in the case of the Mozilla and Apache 2 code, for example) and do not contain much of the original code.
Innovations have come, and continue to come, from the open-source world:
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
- the source availability model used by free and open source software
Free and open source software
Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...
(FOSS) - and closed source are two approaches to the distribution of software.
Background
Under the closed source model source code is not released to the public. Closed source software is maintained by a team who produces their product in a compiledCompiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
executable state, which is what the market is allowed access to. Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, the owner and developer of Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
and Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
, along with other major software companies, have long been proponents of this business model. Although in August 2010, Microsoft interoperability general manager Jean Paoli said Microsoft "loves open source" and its anti-open source position was a mistake.
The FOSS
Foss
Foss may refer toPeople*Foss , people with the last name Foss*Foss Shanahan , New Zealand diplomat*Foss Westcott , English bishop...
model allows for able users to view and modify a product's source code. Common advantages cited by proponents for having such a structure are expressed in terms of trust, acceptance, teamwork and quality.
A non-free license is used to limit what free software movement
Free software movement
The free software movement is a social and political movement with the goal of ensuring software users' four basic freedoms: the freedom to run their software, to study and change their software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. The alternative terms "software libre", "open...
advocates consider to be the essential freedoms. A license, whether providing open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
code or not, that does not stipulate the "four software freedoms", are not considered "free" by the free software movement. A closed source license is one that limits only the availability of the source code. By contrast a copyleft
Copyleft
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work...
license claims to protect the "four software freedoms" by explicitly granting them and then explicitly prohibiting anyone to redistribute the package or reuse the code in it to make derivative works without including the same licensing clauses. Some licenses grant the four software freedoms but allow redistributors to remove them if they wish. Such licenses are sometimes called permissive software licenses. An example of such a license is the FreeBSD License which allows derivative software to be distributed as non-free or closed source, as long as they give credit to the original designers.
FOSS can and has been commercialized by companies such as Red Hat
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....
, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, Novell
Novell
Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...
, Oracle
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
, Mozilla Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
, VMware
VMware
VMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
and others.
Proprietary software
The primary business model for closed-source software involves the use of constraints on what can be done with the software and the restriction of access to the original source code. This can result in a form of imposed artificial scarcityArtificial scarcity
Artificial scarcity describes the scarcity of items even though the technology and production capacity exists to create an abundance. The term is aptly applied to non-rival resources, i.e. those that do not diminish due to one person's use, although there are other resources which could be...
on a product that is otherwise very easy to copy and redistribute. The end result is that an end-user is not actually purchasing software, but purchasing the right to use the software. To this end, the source code to closed-source software is considered a trade secret by its manufacturers.
FOSS
FOSS methods, on the other hand, typically do not limit the use of software in this fashion. Instead, the revenue model is based mainly on support services. Red Hat Inc. and Canonical Ltd.Canonical Ltd.
Canonical Ltd. is a private company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu Linux and related projects. Canonical is registered in London and employs staff around the world...
are such companies that give its software away freely, but charge for support services. The source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
of the software is usually given away, and pre-compiled binary software frequently accompanies it for convenience. As a result, the source code can be freely modified. However, there can be some license-based restrictions on re-distributing the software. Generally, software can be modified and re-distributed for free, as long as credit is given to the original manufacturer of the software. In addition, FOSS can generally be sold commercially, as long as the source-code is provided. There are a wide variety of free software licenses that define how a program can be used, modified, and sold commercially (see GPL
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
, LGPL
GNU Lesser General Public License
The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...
, and BSD-type licenses
BSD licenses
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses. The original license was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix-like operating system after which it is named....
). FOSS may also be funded through donations.
Handling competition
This model has proved somewhat successful, as witnessed in the LinuxLinux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
community. There are numerous GNU/Linux distribution
Linux distribution
A Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...
s available, but a great many of them are simply modified versions of some previous version. For example, Fedora Linux, Mandriva Linux
Mandriva Linux
Mandriva Linux is a Linux distribution distributed by Mandriva. It uses the RPM Package Manager...
, and PCLinuxOS
PCLinuxOS
PCLinuxOS, often shortened to PCLOS, is a GNU/Linux distribution, with KDE Plasma Desktop as its default user interface. It is a primarily free software operating system for personal computers aimed at ease of use...
are all derivatives of an earlier product, Red Hat Linux
Red Hat Linux
Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004.Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994...
. In fact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux-based operating system developed by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z, and desktop versions for x86 and x86-64...
is itself a derivative of Fedora Linux. This is an example of one vendor creating a product, allowing a third-party to modify the software, and then creating a tertiary product based on the modified version. All of the products listed above are currently produced by software service companies.
Operating systems built on the Linux kernel
Linux kernel
The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....
are available for a wider range of processor architectures than Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, including PowerPC
PowerPC
PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
and SPARC
SPARC
SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
. None of these can match the sheer popularity of the x86 architecture, nevertheless they do have significant numbers of users; Windows remains unavailable for these alternative architectures, although there have been such ports of it in the past.
The most obvious complaint against FOSS revolves around the fact that making money through some traditional methods, such as the sale of the use of individual copies and patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
royalty
Royalties
Royalties are usage-based payments made by one party to another for the right to ongoing use of an asset, sometimes an intellectual property...
payments, is much more difficult and sometimes impractical with FOSS. Moreover, many see the introduction of FOSS as damaging to the market for commercial software. Most software development companies sell licenses to use individual copies of software as their primary source of income, using a combination of trade secret
Trade secret
A trade secret is a formula, practice, process, design, instrument, pattern, or compilation of information which is not generally known or reasonably ascertainable, by which a business can obtain an economic advantage over competitors or customers...
s and copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
, patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
, and trademark
Trademark
A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...
laws (collectively called intellectual property rights laws). Fees from sale and licensing of commercial software are the primary source of income for companies that sell software.
Open source software has a large number of alternative funding streams, which are actually better-connected to the real costs of creating and maintaining software. After all, the cost of making a copy of a software program is essentially zero, so per-use fees are perhaps unreasonable. At one time, open-source software development was almost entirely volunteer-driven, and although this is true for many small projects, many alternative funding streams have been identified and employed for FOSS:
- Give away the program and charge for installation and support (used by many Linux distributions).
- "Commoditize complements": make a product cheaper or free so that people are more likely to purchase a related product or service you do sell.
- Cost avoidance / cost sharing: many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share development costs (this is the genesis of the X Window SystemX Window SystemThe X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
and the ApacheApache HTTP ServerThe Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache , is web server software notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. In 2009 it became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone...
web server). - DonationDonationA donation is a gift given by physical or legal persons, typically for charitable purposes and/or to benefit a cause. A donation may take various forms, including cash, services, new or used goods including clothing, toys, food, and vehicles...
s - Crowd fundingCrowd fundingCrowd funding describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money and other resources together, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations...
Increasingly, FOSS is developed by commercial organizations. In 2004, Andrew Morton
Andrew Morton (computer programmer)
Andrew Keith Paul Morton is an Australian software engineer, best known as one of the lead developers of the Linux kernel...
noted that 37,000 of the 38,000 recent patches in the Linux kernel
Linux kernel
The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software....
were created by developers directly paid to develop the Linux kernel. Many projects, such as the X Window System and Apache, have had commercial development as a primary source of improvements since their inception. This trend has accelerated over time.
There are some who counter that the commercialization of FOSS is a poorly devised business model because commercial FOSS companies answer to parties with opposite agendas. On one hand commercial FOSS companies answer to volunteers developers, who are difficult to keep on a schedule, and on the other hand they answer to shareholders, who are expecting a return on their investment. Often FOSS development is not on a schedule and therefore it may have an adverse effect on a commercial FOSS company releasing software on time.
Innovation
Dr. R. Keith Sawyer claimed in a article on Huffington Post 2007 that Open-source software are more derivative than innovative, with Linux being a derivative of Unix, and Firefox not being different from any other browser.. Gary HamelGary Hamel
Dr. Gary P. Hamel is an American management expert. He is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago.-Early life:...
counters this claim by saying that quantifying who or what is innovative is impossible.
The implementation of compatible FOSS replacements for proprietary software is encouraged by the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...
to make it possible for their users to use FOSS instead of proprietary software, for example they have been listed GNU Octave
GNU Octave
GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with MATLAB...
, an API-compatible replacement for MATLAB
MATLAB
MATLAB is a numerical computing environment and fourth-generation programming language. Developed by MathWorks, MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages,...
, as one of their high priority projects, in the past this list contained free binary compatible Java and CLI implementations, like GNU Classpath
GNU Classpath
GNU Classpath is a project aiming to create a free software implementation of the standard class library for the Java programming language. Despite the massive size of the library to be created, the majority of the task is already done, including Swing, CORBA, and other major parts. The Classpath...
and DotGNU
DotGNU
DotGNU is a part of the GNU Project that aims to provide a free software replacement for Microsoft's .NET Framework by Free Software Foundation...
. Thus even “derivative” developments are important in the opinion of many people from FOSS. However, there is no quantitative analysis, if FOSS is less innovative than proprietary software, since there are derivative/reimplementing proprietary developments, too.
Some of the largest well-known FOSS projects are either legacy code (e.g., FreeBSD or Apache) developed a long time ago independently of the free software movement
Free software movement
The free software movement is a social and political movement with the goal of ensuring software users' four basic freedoms: the freedom to run their software, to study and change their software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. The alternative terms "software libre", "open...
, or by companies like Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
(which open-sourced its code with the hope that they can compete better), or by companies like MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
which use FOSS to lure customers for its more expensive licensed product. However, it is notable that most of these projects have seen major or even complete rewrites
Rewrite (programming)
A rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite is not using existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch...
(in the case of the Mozilla and Apache 2 code, for example) and do not contain much of the original code.
Innovations have come, and continue to come, from the open-source world:
- GmailFSGmailFSGmailFS is a virtual file system originally developed by Richard Jones that uses a Gmail e-mail account for storage. GmailFS is written for Linux, but Windows and Mac OS X ports exist too. It originally was based on underlying SMTP and POP3 interation with gmail...
is a good example of the collaborative nature of much open-source development. Building on FUSEFilesystem in UserspaceFilesystem in Userspace is a loadable kernel module for Unix-like computer operating systems that lets non-privileged users create their own file systems without editing kernel code...
(which allows filesystems to be implemented in userspace, instead of as code that needs to be loaded into the kernel) combined with libgmail, which is a PythonPython (programming language)Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
library for programmatic access to a user's GmailGmailGmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though...
message store, the result is the ability to use the multiple gigabytes of Gmail message space as a fileserver accessible from anywhere on the Internet. - PerlPerlPerl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
, the pioneering open-source scripting language, made popular many features, like regular expressions and associative arrayAssociative arrayIn computer science, an associative array is an abstract data type composed of a collection of pairs, such that each possible key appears at most once in the collection....
s, that were unusual at the time. The newer PythonPython (programming language)Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
language continues this innovation, with features like functional constructs and class-dictionary unification. - dcrawDcrawdcraw is an open-source computer program which is able to read numerous raw image formats, typically produced by high-end digital cameras. dcraw converts these images into the standard PPM and TIFF image formats...
is an open-source tool for decoding RAW-format images from a variety of digital cameraDigital cameraA digital camera is a camera that takes video or still photographs, or both, digitally by recording images via an electronic image sensor. It is the main device used in the field of digital photography...
s, which can produce better images than the closed-source tools provided by the camera vendors themselves. - A number of laptop models are available with a particular emphasis on multimedia capabilities. While these invariably come preinstalled with a copy of Microsoft Windows, some of them also offer an alternative "fast-bootInstant onIn computers, instant on is the ability to boot nearly instantaneously, so one can get online or use a specific application without waiting for a PC's traditional operating system to launch. Instant-on technology is today mostly used on laptops, netbooks, and nettops because the user can boot up...
" mode (such as Phoenix HyperSpaceHyperSpace (software)Hyperspace is an instant-on Linux-based operating system that has been developed by Phoenix Technologies. It is an application environment that can run either independently or side-by-side with a traditional operating system such as Red Hat Linux. Users are able to boot their personal computers in...
) based on GNU/Linux. This gets around the long time it can take to boot up Windows. - SongbirdSongbird (software)Songbird is a free and open source software audio player and web browser, with a stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web."...
, Amarok and ExaileExaileExaile is a music player that was originally conceived to be similar in style and function to KDE's Amarok 1.4, but use the GTK+ widget toolkit rather than Qt...
are FOSS music players that integrate internet-based data sources to an unprecedented degree, taking song information from MusicBrainzMusicBrainzMusicBrainz is a project that aims to create an open content music database. Similar to the freedb project, it was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB...
, related track information from last.fmLast.fmLast.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed 30 million active users in March 2009. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for UK£140m ....
, album cover art from amazon.comAmazon.comAmazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
and displaying an artist's Wikipedia page within the player. - While admittedly inspired by Mac OS XMac OS XMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
's QuartzQuartz (graphics layer)Quartz specifically refers to a pair of Mac OS X technologies, each part of the Core Graphics framework: Quartz 2D and Quartz Compositor. It includes both a 2D renderer in Core Graphics and the composition engine that sends instructions to the graphics card...
graphics layer, Compiz Fusion has pioneered the concept of "plug in" window decorators and animation effects. Users can develop their own creative and unique effects. - Open-source telecommunication products, such as the Asterisk PBXAsterisk (PBX)Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange ; it was created in 1999 by Mark Spencer of Digium. Like any PBX, it allows attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network and...
, have revolutionized the ICT industry. - There are substantial efforts towards the implementation of a semantic desktopSemantic desktopIn computer science, the Semantic Desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface and data handling capabilities so that data is more easily shared between different applications or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a...
in FOSS communities. - Today's desktop environments are innovating regarding their unique idea of a Social DesktopSocial DesktopThe Social Desktop idea describes how online communities and web collaborations can be integrated into desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME and how they could directly be accessed by desktop applications such as a Plasmoids....
. - Many academic research projects release their results as FOSS.
Business models
In its 2008 Annual Report, Microsoft stated that FOSS business models challenge its license-based software model and that the firms who use these business models do not bear the cost for their software development. The company also stated in the report:See also
- Linux adoptionLinux adoptionLinux adoption refers to new use of the Linux computer operating system by homes, organizations, companies, and governments, while Linux migration refers to the change from using other operating systems to using Linux....
- GNU ProjectGNU ProjectThe GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated GNU operating system development in January, 1984...
- Open systemOpen system (computing)Open systems are computer systems that provide some combination of interoperability, portability, and open software standards. The term was popularized in the early 1980s, mainly to describe systems based on Unix,...
- Vendor lock-inVendor lock-inIn economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs...
- Network effectNetwork effectIn economics and business, a network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.The classic example is the telephone...