Hi Mukund,
On Thursday 21 Oct 2004 12:03 pm, Mukund N Rathi wrote:
> Can someone please Explain me, in very very short cuz I have read that
> site, What's OSS,
Let me have a go at this. Though it might not be as short as you expected.
Way back, things were simple and people freely shared their knowledge,
including the clever ways they thought up for solving software problems. It
didn't take too long though for some bunch of greedy and insecure programmer
to put restrictions on the use of the knowledge that they distributed.
This was like saying, I'll sell you books so that you may read them but
only if you agree never to write books yourself because that would affect my
book sales, also if you do, then I'll call you a thief, a pirate, because you
would have written ideas that were based on mine which which you got from
reading my books.
One man named 'Richard Stallman' saw how wrong this was and so decided to
dedicate his life to telling people about it and offering them an alternative
that did not make slaves of the consumers of software. He and a group of like
minded people started the free software foundation (FSF) and the GNU project,
with the intention of creating and distributing software that came with the
freedom to examine the internals, use it for any purpose that you might see
fit, modify it to suit your needs and share it freely with your peers.
In addition to this since the FSF realized that without proper
protection, their efforts might get misused by the very same people to whose
software they are offering an alternative to. So, they came up with the Gnu
Public License (GPL). The GPL is a legal document, that states in legal terms
all the freedoms that I mentioned above and also requires that when something
is redistributed under the GPL it would give the recipeint the same freedoms
that the provider got when she received a copy of the GPL'ed software. This
effectively meant that companies would not be able to repackage and sell the
efforts of the coders who wrote free software, without allowing users to do
the same with their software. All this happened under the banner of 'Free
Software'.
Incidentally, Linus created the linux kernel and licensed it under GPL.
Soon, a lot of people started using and distributing GNU software (which were
as vast as the traditional Unix toolkit) running over the linux kernel. They
just called such systems Linux. From then on, companies like RedHat and
Mandrake, started formally packaging and selling systems like these calling
them RedHat Linux or Mandrake Linux ..etc.
Now, as the free software comunity grew, some people of the comunity who
wanted to promote the idea of sharing the software noticed that they could
not get the message across their 'pointy haired bosses (PHB's)' or directors
on the board of software companies. They realized that the stupid suits just
assumed that the 'free' in 'free software' referred to the price, which
implied no cash/revenue/sales figures ...etc. They also noticed that some
businesses would like to experiment with selling free software but were
reluctant to go all the way and give the users all the freedoms. These
members of the community decided that they would promote the idea of sharing
the source code under the name 'Open Source Software'. They founded the OSS
foundation which certified certain End User License Agreements (EULA) as
being 'Open Source Compliant'. They did this, so that business who wanted to
share source code had a choice of different licenses - including but not
limited to the GPL.
Well, there is a lot more to this ....but I guess you have enough info to ask
specific questions.
> and whether this group is a OSS users group or Linux
> user group?
I don't know what it *is* ....but I think it was founded with the intention of
being a general linux user group where talk about OSS and free software was
also appreciated.
HTH
Regards
Steve
--
Once, when the secrets of science were the jealously guarded property
of a small priesthood, the common man had no hope of mastering their arcane
complexities. Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to
obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science.
Today all that has changed: a dim, incoherent knowledge of science is
available to anyone.
-- Tom Weller, "Science Made Stupid"
--
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