October - 2004 issue > Feature: Open Source

By Venkat Ramana

Paul Gustafson and William Koff, Senior Executives at CSC’s Leading Edge Forum write: Something disruptive is happening when:

organizations operate on the premise of paying $0 for new software infrastructure, demanding justification for any purchase costs above that

a global software development community over 800,000 strong challenges the leading software vendors like no competitor can

organizations achieve time-to-market, innovation and product quality like never before

commodity computing platforms bring significant price-performance benefits to more and more organizations, defying proprietary approaches

organizations eye the methodology of the global development community to improve their own way of developing software

governments around the world issue directives steering away from proprietary software, and

software vendors are forced to prove their case

.

That disruption is open source, the software development model made popular by the Linux operating system. With Linux as the star, there is a rich cast of open source software available today for Web servers, application servers, databases, content management, office systems, browsers, development tools, security and more. Open source brings about the reorganization of millions of software developers into global collaborative communities, amassing a strength order of magnitude greater than what is possible in the proprietary software realm.

The lure of open source software is that it is “free” in the sense that anyone can use it, modify it, create derived works from it, and redistribute it—and there are no license fees.

Jay Michaelson, a co-founder of Wasabi Systems and a reputed legal counsel, has this to offer in his article There is no such thing as a free (software) lunch (ACMQueue): “The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software to make sure the software is free for all its users.” So begins the GNU General Public License, or GPL, which has become the most widely used of open source software licenses. Freedom is the watchword—it's no coincidence that the organization that wrote the GPL is called the Free Software Foundation—and that open source developers everywhere proclaim, “Information wants to be free.”

As the GPL indicates two paragraphs later, however, “To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.” As most open source software developers know, this means that, in practice, the GPL is actually one of the less “free” software licenses out there because it requires anyone who modifies a GPL’d program to make the program’s code freely available, if the program is “distributed” to others.

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