New World Of Technology

Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Before the term open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive retooling of the computing source code. Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, the new phrase "open-source software" was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing,domain, and consumer issues created.

The open source model includes the concept of concurrent yet different agendas and differing approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial software companies. A main principle and practice of open source software development is peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product, source-material, "blueprints", and documentation available at no cost to the public. This is increasingly being applied in other fields of endeavor, such as biotechnology.

Applications

Many fields of study and social and political views have been affected by the growth of the concept of open source. Advocates in one field often support the expansion of open source in other fields. For example, Linus Torvalds said, "the future is open source everything." But Eric Raymond and other founders of the open source movement have sometimes publicly argued against speculation about applications outside software, saying that strong arguments for software openness should not be weakened by overreaching into areas where the story is less compelling. The broader impacts of the open source movement, and the extent of its role in the development of new information sharing procedures, remain to be seen.

The open source movement has inspired increased transparency and liberty in other fields, including the release of biotechnology research by CAMBIA, Wikipedia,and other projects. The open-source concept has also been applied to media other than computer programs, e.g., by Creative Commons. It also constitutes an example of user innovation (see for example the book Democratizing Innovation). Often, open source is an expression where it simply means that a system is available to all who wish to work on it. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public

Computer software

Open source software is software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. Examples of open-source software products are:

Programming language

• PHP - Scripting language suited for the web

OS

• GNU Project — “a sufficient body of free software”
• Linux — operating system kernel based on Unix
• OpenBSD — operating system derived from Unix
• FreeBSD — operating system derived from Unix
• OpenSolaris — Unix Operating System from Sun Microsystems
• Symbian — real-time mobile operating system

Server

• Apache — HTTP web server
• Tomcat web server — web container
• Mediawiki — wiki server software, the software that runs Wikipedia
• Alfresco — content management system
• RenovatioCMS — content management system
• Joomla — content management system
• Drupal — content management system
• TYPO3 — content management system
• WordPress — blog software
• MongoDB — document-oriented, non-relational database
• Eclipse — software development environment comprising an integrated development environment (IDE)
• Moodle — course management system or virtual learning environment
• openSIS — open source Student Information System

Client software

• osCommerce — ecommerce
• PeaZip — File archiver
• Mozilla Firefox — web browser
• Mozilla Thunderbird — e-mail client
• OpenOffice.org — office suite
• Stockfish — chess engine series, considered to be one of the strongest chess programs of the world
• 7-Zip — File archiver

And many, many more

Computer hardware

Open source hardware is hardware whose initial specification, usually in a software format, are published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the hardware and source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source hardware evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual hardware/software developers, hobbyists, as well as very large companies. Examples of open source hardware initiatives are:

• Openmoko: a family of open source mobile phones, including the hardware specification and the operating system.
• OpenRISC: an open source microprocessor family, with architecture specification licensed under GNU GPL and implementation under LGPL.
• Sun Microsystems's OpenSPARC T1 Multicore processor. Sun has released it under GPL.
• Arduino, a microcontroller platform for hobbyists, artists and designers.
• Simputer, an open hardware handheld computer, designed in India for use in environments where computing devices such as personal computers are deemed inappropriate.
• LEON: A family of open source microprocessors distributed in a library with peripheral IP cores, open SPARC V8 specification, implementation available under GNU GPL.

;~VIA WIKIPEDIA