-Caveat Lector- from: http://newmedia.com/newmedia/99/01/feature/Set_Free.html <A HREF="http://newmedia.com/newmedia/99/01/feature/Set_Free.html">Feature: Set Your Code Free</A> ----- (Published in NewMedia January 1999 Contents) FEATURE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SET YOUR CODE FREE by Harvey Blume Open Source will change your business forever. Step into the flow of evolving software, make changes, and become part of a brain trust solution. For centuries, many American Indian tribes had an economy exemplified by the "potlatch ceremony," in which they would camp along the salmon-rich rivers, hold feasts, and give gifts. Potlatch can be loosely translated as gift or giving. In a potlatch economy, you generate wealth by circulating it. You destroy wealth by hoarding. It may seem at first that such an arrangement is as far as you can get from today's digital economy with its cutthroat competition, rushed development cycles, and the looming giant, Microsoft. But there are some who say: Look again. The Internet has been digital potlatch all along, running on code that developers put back in the bit stream to be enriched by other programmers. This is true of Linux, BIND, sendmail, Apache, and Perl. Take these core programs out of circulation and the Internet as we know it ceases to exist. What these programs have in common is a model of software development known as open source, meaning the source code is not withheld as proprietary, but is instead made available to the community at large. But open source goes back even farther than that. It actually has place of pride in the history of technology. In the early years of the computer industry manufacturers such as IBM shipped the source code of their operating systems along with their computers. There were so few people who knew how to keep this kind of software working that IBM invited the community to help. While open source has long been implicated in the deep structure of computers and the Internet, it has also become a breaking story. Netscape made headlines when it released the source to its browser in March 1998. In November, the Justice Department suit against Microsoft flushed out a Microsoft internal memo about open source, and The New York Times (November 3, 1998) printed the URL www.opensource.org/halloween.html) where the full document, some 15,000 words, could be accessed -- along with a cheerful running commentary from Eric Raymond, open source's best-known advocate. Raymond says that Microsoft and open source are on a collision course, and that Microsoft's strategy will be to lock up the protocols necessary for software development. But you don't have to wait for the conclusion of an apocalyptic battle between Microsoft and the ultimate un-Microsoft in order to take advantage of open-source development. In fact, if you're a media developer, you would be crazy not to look into how open source can change your business. Many in the digital media community are already using open-source software to run their online businesses. Instead of waiting to see what system updates will be doled out to them every two years, they are standing in the flow of the evolving software, seeing and requesting changes while a large brain trust tackles problems. Open source allows small and large companies to increase their development team with no additional costs. In fact, because of the low -- sometimes nonexistent -- cost of using open-source products, the industry could save millions. Finding Your Own Open Code Yonaton Yoshpe, a Boston area Web developer, had his first brush with open source in 1988, when he was working with a team of engineers trying to build a program to transfer data in real time. Because time was short and they did not want to start the project from scratch, the group looked for and found an open-source prototype. "Afterward, whenever I approached new projects, open source was what I looked for first," says Yoshpe. Today, Yoshpe is the founder of Drive, which owns and operates Landings.com, the largest and busiest aviation Web site in the world. Landings gets over 500,000 visitors a month, and provides users with details on aviation law and news about experimental aircraft. The software for Landings, which has been evolving since 1994, consists of a transaction-based system with a set of Internet community functions that support advertising, bulletin boards, client tracking, personalization, directory models, and dynamic processing of HTML. But at the core of the system there is an open-source program. Yoshpe's decision to build Landings around open source was eminently practical: The source code was there, it was free, and, as his long experience with it led him to expect it was reliable. ===== Open Source Licensing by Stig Hackv�n Open source www.opensource.org is actually a new name for an old tradition of open collaboration in the hacker community. Contrary to the fear, there are many successful approaches to licensing within the open-source community. New license variants are constantly emerging -- often applications will have several licenses during their lifespans. Here are the three main forms of open source licensing. BSD: Berkeley System Distribution-Style Licenses BSD-style licenses are the oldest and least restrictive open-source licenses. They give licensees the option of creating private works (commercial software with unpublished source code). Contributing the changes back to the original public version is optional rather than mandatory. However, even though it's not required, many developers voluntarily send the code back into the system. BSD-licensed software has flourished and provides a great deal of the Internet's core functionality. Successes include BIND, Apache, and sendmail. GPL: GNU General Public License Authored by Richard Stallman in 1983, the GNU GPL is the GNU Project's licensing implementation of the copyleft concept. While copyright keeps people from making copies of original works, copyleft grants unlimited permission to copy and modify the licensed source code. More important, copyleft creates an obligation to distribute the source code without fee or additional license terms, to all derivative works. The focus of the GNU Project is "free software, where free refers to freedom and not price." You can sell free software, but you must also give away the source code without fee and you cannot prevent people from making copies or building upon your work. The GPL is "viral" in the sense that one cannot combine GPL work with other work governed by different licenses. If you enhance a GPL work, then your enhancements would also fall under the GPL terms. GPL successes include the Linux operating system kernel, GNU C Compiler, and the SAMBA file server. MozPL or MPL: Mozilla Public License The MPL, created by Netscape Communications as part of its open-source release of Communicator 5, strikes a balance between the other two licenses. Private derivative works are permitted, while changes to MPL source must be made freely available on the Internet. The MPL, however, is non-viral: additions to (as opposed to modifications of) the MPL-licensed source that form a "larger work" may be licensed differently and need not be published. Stig HackV�n's book on the future of open-source economics and licensing will be published by O'Reilly & Associates early in 1999. ===== ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fight the Good Fight Open source received its sincerest compliment in the form of a Microsoft inter-office memo discussing how the software giant might handle a possible open-source uprising. It pointed out that the Internet proved that open source can meet and exceed commercial quality, but because there was not a single company behind it, Microsoft would have to "target" the process instead. Perhaps most eye-opening is the memo's comment that open source is "long-term credible" and that the company's FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) tactics could not be used to combat it. Because it surfaced right after trick-or-treat weekend, open-source supporter Eric S. Raymond dubbed the memo the "Halloween Document," and called a second memo, containing Microsoft's evaluation of the Linux operating system, Halloween II. Raymond sees the Halloween Documents as proof that Microsoft is averse to peaceful coexistence with open source and that instead the company's goal is to seize control of the very protocols that have allowed open source to flourish. But Raymond is positive that open source, in the form of Linux, is about to take the battle deep into Fortune 500 server market. "I've said it before in public, and I'll stick my neck out again," says Raymond, "Microsoft will no longer be a factor in that market in 18 months." He says that's not only because Linux keeps getting better but also because NT 5.0, (now called Windows 2000 and with its release delayed until late next year) will be deadly. "We know NT 5.0 development is in deep trouble," says Raymond. "According to Microsoft's own admissions, NT 5.0 has 35 million lines of code, a little less than 25 times the size of the Linux kernel. Would you care to guess what that 35 million lines of code is doing?" By most accounts, open source has indeed proven itself in the field of operating systems, servers, and infrastructure in general, but its successes are far fewer when it comes to user applications. However, Raymond is convinced that hackers have just about chewed through the structural problems and are ready to be loosed en masse on applications. He points to Wine, for example, a Windows emulator for Linux desktops, and notes that Corel is helping to complete this implementation of a virtual Windows. Raymond's paper, "The Cathedral and The Bazaar," is credited with influencing Netscape to open its browser's source code in March, 1998. What effect does he think releasing the code has had on Netscape? "The effect they wanted," says Raymond. "They know if Microsoft gets a lock on the browser market, it will then do its standard embrace and destroy number, using control of HTML to lock Netscape out of the server market. Whether or not Netscape ever makes another dime on its browser, by open-sourcing it has made sure Microsoft can never get control of HTML. Open-source programmers were here a long time before Bill Gates came along. We did not make this into a fight to the death. He did. We've been building good systems for over twenty years. Then came the Internet explosion in 1994 and 1995. The Internet and open source have a feedback effect on each other. The growth of the Internet created a medium in which open source can be more effective than ever before. Now we can do what we do well a lot faster and more intensely." --H.B. ===== Windows NT vs. Linux -- Who is the Winner? Microsoft will be the first to tell you that it is not in competition with Linux. It sees Linux as a UNIX competetor. Plus, as we've seen, Windows NT and Linux play very nicely together over the network. However, when examining the differences between open source and commercial products, there is no clearer comparison available then Linux and NT. So may the better OS win. -- S.H. Windows NT Linux PRICE TAG $700 (NT Server), or $270 (NT Workstation). Separate NT licenses are required for each installation. $40-$50 (Red Hat, S.u.S.E., or Caldera distributions). Some distributions come with optional licensed software. Skip the support and it's free off the Web. ADMINISTRATION COST GUI admin tools give NT an easier learning curve. However, NT has a higher incident of blue screen (crashes), so factor in the costs of lost productivity and a babysitter for your network. GUI admin tools are still maturing. Linux systems can be administered over the network, saving your sysadmin time. Most Linux upgrades can be performed without rebooting. HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS Runs on x86 or Alpha. (MIPS and PowerPC were dropped.) Available preinstalled. Requires a Pentium with 32M memory and 200M disk. Runs on x86, Alpha, SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, StrongARM. Available pre-installed on x86, Alpha, MIPS, and StrongARM. Requires a 386 with 16M memory and 200M disk. APPLICATIONS Most off-the-shelf software is available for Windows 98/NT. This is NT's biggest selling point. Many apps are available for NT that are not yet available for Linux. Development tools, Web, mail, news, FTP servers, databases, and Netscape are available for Linux. Plus many other apps are free and open-source. Commercial apps are rapidly appearing (from office productivity suites to Oracle 8). A few Win32 apps will run under the Windows binary emulatior currently in development. SUPPORT Microsoft supports NT. But despite this backing, NT bugs aren't fixed quickly. Many third parties support Windows NT, but they can't fix Windows NT themselves because they don't have access to the source code. No single Microsoft-sized corporation supports Linux, and there's no direct accountability for most Linux software, but the Linux community fixes bugs very promptly. If this sounds scary remember that InfoWorld gave its Best Technical Support award to "the Linux community." Set Your Code Free January 199 Set Your Code Free January 199 Set Your Code Free January 1999 Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------------ home contents about us search i�serv download brain candy threads calendar invision awards ? ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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