Open Source

1 .Taoism of open source

By Chen Nan Yang on September 29, 2007 (1:00:00 PM)
2,500 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Confucius asked Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, "What is Tao?" Lao-tzu opened his mouth but said nothing. Confucius left with a smile, but his students were puzzled. Confucius explained, "Lao-tzu has passed us the Tao. In his mouth, there are no teeth but only a tongue. The hard ones (teeth) died, but the soft one (the tongue) lives; the soft power is stronger than the hard power. That's the Tao!"
Open source is such a soft power. "Soft power is like water," Lao-tzu explained in his book, Tao Te Ching. A single water drop is powerless, but numerous water drops are torrential. Likewise, a single open source participant counts for little, but numerous participants make the open source community strong. Traditional software, on the other hand, is a hard power, like teeth. One big tooth can be strong (take Microsoft, for example), but teeth fall out as time goes by.

Soft power remains weaker than hard

Currently, traditional software remains more important in the software industry. According to Taoism, the reason may be time. Open source is still a new industry and needs to let more "water drops" in. Many good open source projects don't have enough supporters yet. For example, the 3-D rendering software YafRay had a difficult year in 2006 because "original developers did not have more time to collaborate actively in the YafRay development" (see "YafRay Next Generation"). Factors such as lack of development tools and piracy impede developers from getting into the open source industry.
According to a Taoism precept, continual water drops drill through a stone, while hard teeth break in front of the stone. If the water drops aren't enough to form a torrent, they may need more time to drill through the stone. Likewise, in the open source world, YafRay almost ended in 2006, but Mathias Wein (another big "water drop") stepped forward to continue YafRay development. YafRay 0.0.9 was released. If a good open source project has enough participants, it will work like a waterfall overturning rocks. If it doesn't have enough participants, it will continue on and finally drill through the "stone."

Making soft power stronger than hard power

Taoism suggests that humbleness can help turn soft power into hard power. The biggest body of water is the ocean. Lao-tzu said, "The ocean is immense because of its humbleness. It never refuses any tiny stream."
In February 2007, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, had a flame war with GNOME. In Taoist opinion, the problem with GNOME is that it isn't humble enough to accept a "tiny stream."
The strength of open source comes from its numerous participants. However, two problems currently break this strength. The first is that some projects have open source code but aren't open to new participants. For example, GNOME never asks users to send patches when they have problems. Understandably, the overwhelming number of contributors might destroy the GNOME software. However, GNOME might consider managing the "tiny streams" better rather than refusing them.
The second problem is a lack of support and developer tools. Fortunately, this situation is changing. For example, AMD just announced a major strategic change in open source graphic processors support.
If the open source community can be humbler and lower its "water level" to welcome any tiny stream, it will gain enough strength to overcome the "hard power" of the traditional software industry.
In addition to humbleness, Taoism says that soft power can overcome hard power through the "natural way." Because open source software features open code, more programmers are able to view the code, create new functionality, and fix bugs. This follows the same natural way that science has developed over time. For example, people shared the "open source" of black powder from China in the 1860s, so Americans could improve it and use it to build the railroads connecting east and west coasts.

Taoist spirit for open source participants

Chuang-tzu, the greatest Taoist after Lao-tzu, once refused to hold a post as a minister in the government. He said to his king, "Do you see the sacred turtle in your temple? People put it on the altar and feted it with fruit, flowers, and meals. But finally, it lost its soul and had only a shell left. I would rather live in my natural way and walk in the mud happily than be a sacred and rich shell."
In "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement", Richard Stallman explained why he didn't go to the temple of closed source software. He said, "The easy choice was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker.... I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place."
This is the spirit of open source that I like.
Chen Nan Yang is a Chinese freelance journalist and former IT director in the Chinese government.
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Sumber : http://archive09.linux.com/feature/119429

2.NASA Open Source Software

NASA conducts research and development in software and software technology as an essential response to the needs of NASA missions. Under the NASA Software Release policy, NASA has several options for the release of NASA developed software technologies. These options now include Open Source software release. This option is under the NASA Open Source Agreement "NOSA".
The motivations for NASA to distribute software codes Open Source are:
  • To increase NASA software quality via community peer review
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Sumber : http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/opensource/

3 .Open source software development


Open source software development is the process by which open source software (or similar software whose source code is publicly available) is developed. These are software products “available with its source code and under an open source license to study, change, and improve its design”. Examples of popular open source software products are Mozilla Firefox, Google Chromium, Android and the Apache OpenOffice Suite. In the past, the open source software development method has been very unstructured, because no clear development tools, phases, etc., had been defined like with development methods such as Dynamic Systems Development Method. Instead, every project had its own phases. However, more recently there has been much better progress, coordination, and communication within the open source community.
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Sumber : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software_movement

4. Open-source Vs closed-source

The software industry is divided over the pros and cons of open-source versus proprietory "closed-source". Closed-source advocates say that it offers more secure platforms, cleaner applications and products. It also offers higher financial incentives to the charmed circle of developers with access to the code. Open-source advocates say it offers more secure platforms, helps develop more and cleaner apps, and offers financial incentives to a larger base of developers. Bugs get patched quicker again because of the larger population of developers.
What works better in terms of marketshare and profitability? The closed-source Apple platform has few users and much fewer apps than the "semi-open" Windows. Microsoft has consistently generated far higher revenues and profitability than Apple. One reason is that MS simply makes it easier for third-party developers.
But totally free, open-source platforms such as Linux (and the free, open-source Firefox browser) have won marketshare off Windows (and IE). Many apps (both free and paid) have been developed for Linux. A multitude of Firefox plug-ins combined to better security has made it the browser of choice for many.
Bug-discovery and fixes are the most critical aspect of the debate for users. A bug is discovered; it is patched. From day-zero, when the bug is discovered to the day it's patched, it's open season for crackers.
Do open-source bugs get patched quicker? The jury's out. But it does seem full disclosure accelerates the patching process. If you discover a bug in some software you use, it's better not to complain privately to the vendor. Scream loudly about it in every Web forum you can access. 
Last year, Microsoft issued about 55 critical patches for Windows XP. According to the Washington Post, it reacts very significantly quicker on public complaints. On average, MS took 134 days to patch privately-reported vulnerabilities whereas it responded inside 46 days for publicly-reported bugs.
Oracle (which works off open-source platforms) issued over 80 patches in 2005. That suggests that, even if open-source has more bugs, those bugs are also addressed efficiently. Apple has taken much more time than either Oracle or MS in addressing known issues in the QuickTime player.
MS took just 10 days to patch a very serious flaw in the Windows Meta File (WMF) that was flagged in late December. That's commendably quick by corporate standards. But it's glacially slow in the context of the Web. By the time the official MS patch arrived, independent security consultants had written "hot-fixes"; the crackers had written new malware and antivirus vendors had updated signatures to deal with new malware.
The urgency was because unpatched Windows systems are exposed every time an image file is viewed. There is a way to get WMF to run code off a remote location by simply clicking on a picture sent by e-mail or placed on a website. Hundreds of these "poisoned" images are now floating around.
The amazing thing is that WMF flaw has been there for at least five years. It's embedded in every MS operating system since Win2000. Several other flaws and vulnerabilities in WMF have been picked up earlier.
There must have been a collective blindness across the computer security industry for this to stay under the radar so long. The flaw is so basic, it's sparked off a debate as to whether it was deliberate.
Steve Gibson (writer of the popular SpinRite and Shields up! utilities) suggested that it was a backdoor written into the system by MS. Mark Russinovitch of Sysinternals, (the man who flagged the Sony rootkit) thinks WMF code wasn't deliberately written as a backdoor.
Windows isn't open-source but it's close to it because there are millions of beta-testers and people with access to the software development kit (quite a few of whom have demonstrably malicious intent). So this is a peculiar test-case for the debate. Would a completely open-source OS have triggered quicker discovery and patching? Would a totally closed-source OS have left the problem undiscovered and hence, unexploited?
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Sumber : http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/jan/21guest2.htm

5 .The 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems

Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way organisations and individuals create, distribute, acquire and use software and software-based services. OSS has challenged the conventional wisdom of the software engineering and software business communities, has been instrumental for educators and researchers, and has become an important aspect of e-government and information society initiatives. OSS is a complex phenomenon and requires a interdisciplinary understanding of its engineering, technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.
The goal of OSS 2009 is to provide an international forum where a diverse community of professionals from academia, industry and public administration can come together to share research findings and practical experiences. The conference is also meant to provide information and education to practitioners, identify directions for further research, and to be an ongoing platform for technology transfer

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