Open Source : Demystified

  WHEN SOMEONE BUYS   a new smartphone, often they're preoccupied with the camera specs or the size of the screen or its storage capabilities. It's easy to overlook one of the most foundational aspects of these sleek consumer gadgets: their operating systems. The world's most popular mobile operating system is Google's Android. It  powers more than 86% of smartphones in the  world . What's even more remarkable is that Android is based on the open source Linux operating system. That means anyone can view the code at the heart of the vast majority of smartphones, modify it, and, more important, share it with anyone else. This openness enables collaboration. Unlike, say, Microsoft Windows, which was developed and is maintained by a single company, Linux is developed and maintained by more than 15,000 programmers around the world. These programmers might work for companies that compete with each other, or they might volunteer to create something new that’s then given aw...

  The Rise of Open Source The open source software movement grew out of the related, but separate, "free software" movement. In 1983, Richard Stallman, at the time a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said he would create a free alternative to the Unix operating system, then owned by AT&T; Stallman dubbed his alternative GNU, a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix." For Stallman, the idea of "free" software was about more than giving software away. It was about ensuring that users were free to use software as they saw fit, free to study its source code, free to modify it for their own purposes, and free to share it with others. Stallman released his code under a license known as the GNU Public License, or GPL, which guarantees users those four software freedoms. The GPL is a "viral" license, meaning that anyone who creates software based on code licensed under the GPL must also release that derivative code under a ...

   The Future of Open Source The rise of open source hasn't been without glitches. Despite the corporate world's embrace of open source software, many independent or startup-based projects still haven't figured out how to make money. Even the developers of software that’s widely used by major companies can struggle to raise funds to cover their costs or hire others. That can have serious consequences. For example, in 2014, security researchers revealed serious vulnerabilities in two crucial open source projects: OpenSSL and Bash, which are part of many major operating systems. No software is free of potential security problems, but the fact that these issues went undetected for so long highlighted a big problem for open source: Many big-name open source projects rely on lesser-known open source components run by volunteers who have little time to fix problems and no money to hire security auditors. Some companies that have built businesses around open source products...