Free & Open Source Software

"Free as in Freedom: Open Distribution; Open Modification"

The key element of the open source process, as an ideal type, is voluntary participation and voluntary selection of tasks.8

Free and Open Source Software is developed using generally accepted software engineering principles. "An open-source document is much like a physics experiment to which hundreds of researchers contribute."9 However, the FOSS model has reformulated these engineering and scientific principles to serve the need of the development process. Development usually takes place via voluntary contributions to the code base by a community of software coders that sometimes number in the hundreds or thousands. With the FOSS community, anyone so interested can contribute code. So much so that even code from commercial interests is welcomed. Some of the powerful file system architecture (Journaling File System (JFS) and Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP)) of the GNU/Linux operating system were contributed by IBM. HP has contributed code, as has Sun Microsystems, Oracle, SAP, and other big palyers in the software industry.

The development of code in the open source has proven to be contrary to what pundits in the industry warned about. Frederick Brooks, the author of Brooks' Law, which when simplified states: "Adding more manpower to a software project that is late (behind schedule) will make the project even later. Hence the phrase 'the mythical man-month.'"10 What open source has demonstrated is that with an open framework, where meritocracy is paramount, very sophisticated software code--Apache Web Server, GNU/Linux operating system, Open Office desktop application suite--can be developed. The community usually congregates around a charismatic leader, whose vision of that particular project is seen to be benevolent, and meets, the end users' requirements. The Apache Web Server has a 74.5% market share of web server space on the Internet.11

To guage some idea of its curent state, it may be worth noting that in November 1999, SourceForge.net was setup to assist in the open source software development paradigm. Back then, by its modest aspirations, the system was dimensioned for up to 5000 developers, working on 500 projects, connected to the Internet at 10Mbps, with a storage capacity of 10Gb. Five years later, with demand much greater than antcipated, the site currently hosts approximately 1 million developers, 100 thousand projects, with an aggregate connection bandwidth to the Internet of 1.6Gbps, with a storage capacity of 1Tb, on more than 80 high-capcity, high density servers.12 This level of participation gives some indication of the influence of open source and its traction over the last few years especially.

"VA Software (formerly having achieved a record-breaking IPO 1999 with a 700 percent gain on its first day of trading under the name of VA Linux), and has spurred organizations both small and large (like IBM, Sun Microsystems or Netscape) to invest in one way or the other into this new field."13