Week 7: What is Open Source? (Clear)

In my journey through my class, I've learned a lot of things. This week Open Source was a new topic to me and may be to you as well.

Let me start off by saying it's not as complex as it may seem, and can actually be very beneficial to yourself and/or your company.

Once you've set-up, software has zero marginal costs. This means that is minimal to duplicate a copy, but this is once you've already paid for the costs of putting it together. Here are a few things you should think about regarding software:

• Network effects mean as more and more people use the program, the program becomes more valuable. Think about Facebook or Linkedin. As more people are using it or become your friends/connections, it has more value to you. If you go from 300 friends on Facebook to 700 friends, you can touch more people. Another example is Microsoft Office. For an employer, because of how widely-used the product is, it is more beneficial when looking to hire someone since they may already have knowledge of it. This will lower company training costs.
• Switching costs are incurred when you need to think about switching from one company or product to another. You may be using Microsoft Word when another product is introduced to the market and is 50% cheaper to purchase, but will not be compatible with the Word documents you already have. If you've been using Word since it was first introduced, it may be too high of a cost to switch to the new product. You have years and years of data on Word and you would need to replicate the information which will take thousands of hours to come to the same result, the only difference would be a cheaper product. This doesn't mean the cost for your employees to change it all over is worth it.

Open Source is a type of software that has a number of interesting characteristics, which are listed below:

1. Free redistribution: you can download the source and sell or give it away as part of a package
2. Source code: you want to give access to this
3. Derived works: you can go in and change things
4. Integrity of author's source code: tells you who wrote what
5. No discrimination against persons or groups: can't be only for a certain religion
6. No discrimination against fields of endeavor
7. Distribution of license
8. License must not be specific to a product
9. License must not restrict other software
10. License must be technology-neutral: can't require a particular interface (an example is Windows)

Benefits are that multiple people are looking at and editing the code, it's better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost and end to predatory vendor locket. 

Some essentials you need to consider are:

• No license fee. You get the product for free, but that doesn't mean you get the maintenance and other things for free. Think about if you get a free puppy. Sure, the dog was given to you at no cost, but it will need to eat, have a leash, go to the vet and other things that will require you spending money.
• You need access to the source code. You'll be able to fix bugs yourself, modify behaviors and add features. This will make your life a lot easier by having this access rather than waiting around for someone else to take care of an issue.
• Community-not just code. You'll be able to collaborate on development, support resources and contribute your own input.
• The University of Florida is involved in contribution. We are working on Sakai to make it better for mobile devices.
• There is also rapid development
• Spirit of Open Source. Think about this quote from Apache, "Collaborative, consensus-based development process, an open and pragmatic software license and a desire to create high quality software that leads the way in its field." The two most crucial parts are collaborative and consensus-based. The other parts are important, but for the Spirit of Open Source, the focus should be these two parts.

Let's tie this up by saying who is Open Source? There are many different products which are, but a few I list may surprise you. Firefox, Apache (leading web server, they also owned 60% of the market in 2011), Ubuntu (more popular on the desktop side), Linux, My SQL (database), Openoffice.org, Clam AV (anti-virus), Audacity (audio recording and editing). Another thing to note is LAMP is referred to as a powerful platform to create web applications comprised of Linux, Apache, My SQL and PHP.

Knowing what you can use for yourself and/or your business is important because of all the benefits you can receive (reduced cost, less time, better product, etc.). If you're a small business, you can cut costs by using Open Source, which will also help if you don't have that many employees and do not want to hire someone to specialize in the IT area. Having an understanding of the products offered to you or at least the benefits if you try to compare products in the future, will help your business.

A very easy explanation of Open Source is found here. It provides the definition that Open Source is any program whose source code is mad available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit. The site goes into a little more detail, but also explains other key terms that are associated with Open Source such as LAMP, Linux, Samba, distribution, etc.

I hope you've enjoyed learning a little more about Open Source, I've liked sharing my new-found knowledge. Until next week...