************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * May 2003 * * * ************************************* News and Comments Limited beta testing of DB/C DX 13.0 has started. Full beta testing will begin the first week of June. If you are interested in participating, send me an email. The impact of open source software on the computer industry has been accelerating in the past couple of years. When LINUX and Apache came into common use a few years ago, people didn't quite know what to think of free software. Now there are many successful open source projects. This month's article provides a quick overview of the status of the open source movement. don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** Open Source (Free) Software LINUX, FreeBSD, Apache, Eclipse, Mozilla, MySQL, GCC, CVS, Perl, PHP, Ant, Tomcat, JBoss, Jabber, OpenSSL, LibTIFF, Independent JPEG Group - these are some of the most well-known open source software projects and products. There are many others. There are differences in licensing, organization, distribution and other aspects of open source software, but what they all have in common is that the software is free! The success of free software has surprised many in the computer industry. On first reflection, its success seems counterintuitive. Why would anyone put a large effort into creating something and then give it away? It turns out that there are some good reasons why people and companies would do just that. The free software movement is the most disruptive advance to come along since the Internet in the early 90's. Microsoft considers free software to be its greatest threat - much more of a threat than Java, UNIX or any other commercial software. Free software has the potential to make Microsoft's business model obsolete and to severely impact their income stream. Many other software companies also face the same risk. Licensing of open source software varies. One widely used license is the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or just GPL). This is a restrictive license that requires that all modifications made to the software must also be also made available under the same license. LINUX and GCC are the two most important software products that use the GNU GPL. Most other open source software licenses are less restrictive - they do not require that modifications or modified software be made freely available. An example is the license created by IBM for Eclipse. It is called the Common Public License (CPL). It allows companies to do essentially anything with the software, including making modifications that are not made available publicly or are not free. The Apache Software License and others are similar to CPL. The most commonly held notion of why free software exists is that a lone programmer decides to spend the time to build some software - to prove that he can do it or for purely altruistic reasons. The majority of open source projects probably did get started that way. However, most widely used open source software has corporate sponsors that provide the resources for continued development and maintenance of open source projects. LINUX is the prime example of an open source project that was started by a lone programmer - Linus Torvalds. His intent was to build an operating system that was small, fast and free. He released it to the Internet and soon had many others adding features to his small kernel. LINUX did get started in the traditional way. However, today IBM is a major sponsor of LINUX. IBM provides teams of programmers who continue to enhance LINUX in various ways. IBM's reason for providing these resources is simple - it makes money. Software gets better when more people use it. The easiest way to get more people to use something is to give it away free. Thus a critical mass of users can be garnered quickly via the free software. Unlike many open source projects, Eclipse did not get started by a lone programmer working without corporate sponsorship. OTI, an IBM subsidiary, developed it for IBM. It was only after OTI's work was complete that IBM released part of it as open source. However, IBM did not release all of their software as open source. The WebSphere Studio Developer family of software products are commercial software products based on Eclipse. IBM recognized that having a large number of Eclipse-based software products available from various vendors would make their own products more successful. Thus they made millions of dollars of investment available for free. Most corporate contributions to open source software fit into the same pattern. That is, it is in the best interest of the corporation for the software to be successful, and the corporation's primary source of revenue is not the software itself. Red Hat makes its money from providing training and support for LINUX. MySQL and Jabber are corporations that sponsor the continued development of open source projects with the same name. O'Reilly & Associates, a major publisher of computer books, sponsors the Open Source Convention. This convention appears to be the largest gathering of open source advocates in North America. OSCON 2003 will be held July 7-11 in Portland, Oregon. It is interesting to note the types of software that are not available as open source projects. The lack of open source business applications like Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, General Ledger and Payroll is notable. It may be that it is only a matter of time before all software is free! A comprehensive article by David A. Wheeler titled "Why Open Source Software / Free Software? Look at the Numbers!" is available at: . www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html Here are several other related web pages: . opensource.oreilly.com O'Reilly open source home page . www.apache.org Apache Software Foundation . www.linux.org a source for information about LINUX . www.freebsd.org the FreeBSD web site . www.eclipse.org the Eclipse web site . www.gnu.org the Free Software Foundation web site . www.cvshome.org the CVS web site . www.mysql.com the MySQL company web site . www.opensource.org the Open Source Initiative web site . www.sourceforge.net a repository for many open source projects . www.freshmeat.net a repository for many open source projects ****************************************************************************** DB/C DX Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX Fundamentals Date: June 23-25, 2003 Location: Oak Brook, Illinois For information, send email to admin@dbcsoftware.com. ****************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you monthly, just send an email message to 'dbcnews-subscribe@dbcsoftware.com'. 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