Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

What is Open-Source?

Today, the term open-source is pretty popular. But it also means a lot of things. Would you like to understand more about it? Learn more on this post.
Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash

Nowadays, the term open-source is pretty popular. But it also means a lot of things. Let's learn about its history and how it changed not only how we use software and services today, but also how it changed the society as a whole.

A little bit of History

The history of the free software/open-source mixes with the history of early computing and Unix itself so it's important to provide a little of context first.

Some say that it was Dr. Donald Knuth the first person to release a program's source code (TeX) to the public for free, but Richard Stallman, another brilliant developer who since his early years in the Harvard, then MIT labs believed (and later campaigned) that software should be open (ie., with its source code open to the public) and free (as in speech, not as in beer). His initiative soon would be known as the free software movement. 

The Free Software Movement

Before the term open-source became popular, the term "free software", created and popularized by Richard Stallman, was more prevalent. Stallman, who in 1983 started the the GNU operating system with the goal of creating a "complete Unix-compatible software system" composed entirely of free software.

Stallman who working in MIT's AI lab in the early 1970s became frustrated with the spread of proprietary software, saw it as a violation of people’s rights to innovate and improve existing software. His experiences with proprietary software made him an activist in defense of free software. Today it's difficult to imagine Linux, free and open-source software today without his contributions.

Speaking of contributions, some of Stallman's contributions to humankind are: the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, the GNU Compiler Collection, Emacs and the GPL / GNU General Public License.

Open-Source as a term

But Stallman's vision of free software had opposition from those who thought that the requirements imposed by the the free software movement were much too rigid. That group composed of influent people such as Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Michael Tiemann and Eric S. Raymond endorsed the adoption of the term open-source proposed by Christine Peterson as a broader and better alternative.

Soon, other influential names such as Linus Torvalds, Phil Hughes, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum, Michael Tiemann, Paul Vixie, Jamie Zawinski, and Eric S. Raymond would be aligned with the new term raising awareness and industry-wide adoption.

Licenses

Licenses are an essential aspect of open-source software. The most common are:
  • GNU General Public License: the license created by Stallman himself. Today there are mainly three GNU licenses: AGPLv3, GPLv3, LGPLv3
  • Mozilla Public License 2.0: Permissions of this weak copyleft license are conditioned on making available source code of licensed files and modifications of those files under the same license
  • Apache License 2.0: A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices.
  • MIT License: A short and simple permissive license with conditions only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices.
Understanding the licenses is critical to any open-source project and is definitely a complex subject. We will address this in a more detailed post in the future.

Broader Open-Source Reach

Today, the term "open-source" goes beyond software and reaches many segments, including:

The world without Free/Open software

The world we live today would be drastically different if we didn't have these initiatives by Richard Stallman, Linux Torvalds, the others previously mentioned and millions of anonymous contributors worldwide.

Below, some of the ways in which free/open-source software changed the world:

  • the Internet: pretty much all the infrastructure of the internet today (routers, switches, firewalls, etc) runs Linux or open-source software. Not to mention the web servers (Apache, Nginx), databases (PostgreSQL, Redis, MySQL) and even most of the programming languages and libraries used to develop the tools and services you use are open-source.
  • Services: cloud services are built on top of the above list and use container technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, containerd, KVM, QEMU which are also open-source.
  • Faster time to market: open-source also fosters and is essential for a faster time to market, critical to business today. 
  • Reduced development cost: it's probable that Google, Spotify, Tesla and even Amazon wouldn't exist today without open-source. It's impossible to imagine how to develop so complex products and services without the broad diversity of open tools available today.
  • Education: education also benefits significantly from free/open-source software. The contributions range from the device learners are using (Android, Chrome OS for example) to the services, infrastructure and broad range of technologies that support them.
  • IoT: the next age of computing will reach virtually every digital device around us. And Linux/open-source software is the 
  • Robotics: robotics also heavily utilizes open-source technologies (including hardware). 
  • Supercomputers: all of the supercomputers today run Linux. These computers are used for researches and are critical to the evolution of humankind.
  • And everything else: from agriculture to rockets, spaceships and nuclear plants, open-source runs everywhere.

Famous open-source initiatives

Today, there are many, many initiatives and projects that are extremely successful and follow the open-source. Some of the most biggest projects today are:

Linux and Open-Source

The GNU General Public License was the tool Linus Torvalds needed to grow his project. Without the open-source model, the distributed and collaborative nature of open-source and its ever growing audience of fellow contributors and sponsors, it's impossible to imagine that Linux would have have reached 30 million lines of code and US$ 5 billion in value.

And without the GNU operating system, we wouldn't have a solid foundation to build the fantastic Linux distributions we have available for free today.

Conclusion

The world as we know today would be radically different without the contributions of those pioneers back in the 80's. Between them, Richard Stallman was definitely the most important proponent of the free-software agenda which was later extended by the open-source movement reaching wider audiences and gaining corporate endorsement.

Today, Linux is the biggest open-source project in the world and rules the cloud, the Internet, mobiles phones and even supercomputers. Without Linux and open-source, it's difficult to imagine how far would the society be today. Definitely we'd be behind, way behind.

References

See Also

Monday, October 12, 2020

Why is Linux free?

Linux is secure, fast, reliable and.. free? If that seems too good to be true you need to know more about Linux.
Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash

On previous posts, we discussed why use Linux and one of our most compelling arguments to use Linux is that Linux is free. But since Linux is so secure, fast, reliable, how can it be free? Let's understand what that means and how it happens.

A little history

Avoiding jumping too much back in history, it's important to understand the contribution model in which Linux was built. Once upon a time, there was a developer named Linus Torvalds who wanted to build a kernel to run a free Unix clone at home. He named the project Linux (Linux + Unix) and sent a message to the world looking for volunteers.

That project attracted so much attention that soon, hundreds of other developers joined that cause forming a big network of contributors. Linux, the kernel was the missing piece to produce a completely free operating system as most of the tools were already built on the GNU operating system.

The first distributions

With all the pieces to build a free and open-source operating system available, developers started creating the first Linux distributions. Some of them you may have heard of: Debian, Red Hat and Slackware, the most popular ones.

What about now?

The fact that Linux runs everywhere and that thousands of successful products are built on top of it, is the biggest motivator to use it. It's estimated that today the Linux kernel be worth $5 billion dollars. Given its licensing model, companies building new products today (for example, Tesla, Google or even Microsoft) can leverage Linux and more quickly reach the market saving them literally millions of dollars.

Today, Linux's development is supervised by Linus and sponsored by the Linux Foundation which employs Linus, Greg Kroah-Hartman (and others) to coordinate and foster the development of Linux around the world.

But this model does not only apply to Linux itself. The GNU project and thousands of other larger and smaller projects are being developed every single day by anonymous contributors worldwide following the same methodology.

But why is Linux is free?

Because the Linux kernel, the GNU operating system and all other tools needed to create a free operating system are available as open-source software respecting the premises of the free-software movement fostered by the GNU foundation, it's guaranteed that, as long as there are volunteers to build the distributions, you'll have a free/open-source operating system to run wherever you want.

And this is exactly what happens.

Linux Distributions

Today we have two different lines of Linux distributions being built and available for free: community-based distributions and enterprise-sponsored distributions. Let's review them.

Community-based distributions

Community-based distributions are Linux systems built by volunteers and living of donations. The most popular these days are:

Commercially-sponsored distributions

For brevity, let's define as commercially-sponsored, those distributions that receive grants from commercial companies to support the development and maintenance of those systems. Note that there's nothing wrong with this category since most of the distributions run completely independently from their commercial institution. The most popular are:

But one could charge for it, couldn't they?

The short answer is a definitely yes! And indeed some companies charge for it one way or another. And how do they make money? Well, read the next section to understand.

How companies make money with Linux

Differently from this blog, Linux is not all about charity. There's lots of money being made on it today. Essentially, companies can use Linux in virtually any line of business. Just to illustrate some:

  • support
  • training
  • certification
  • licenses
  • building products around it
  • cloud services
  • storage solutions
  • networking solutions
  • ads
  • social networks
  • cars
  • TVs
  • Watches
  • and more, much more! 😊

Conclusion

On this post we reviewed briefly how Linux was created and how it's license model guarantees that it will remain free for future generations. We also touched briefly on how companies leverage Linux to get faster to the market and to make money. Regardless of who builds your favorite distro, all of us benefit from this massive chain of anonymous contributions.

Hope it helps!

See Also

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