AUTONOMIC COMPUTING AND OPEN SOURCE

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AUTONOMIC COMPUTING AND OPEN SOURCE

The Open Source movement today owes much of its creation to a few key individuals. Often in cultural revolutions, particularly in high-tech areas, one person's groundbreaking idea is transformed into a major movement. In the high-tech industry, an entrepreneur starts with an idea, which then becomes a major movement. This happened with open source.

There is a considerable debate and argument over who originated the open source movement. For example, many say it dates back to 1977, when Bill Joy originated the UNIX and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license at the University of California at Berkeley. This first distribution included the Pascal system, and, in an obscure subdirectory of the Pascal source, the editor ex. Bill acted as the distribution secretary, and sent out about 30 free copies of the system for collaboration.

Others say it was Richard Stallman. In 1984, Richard Stallman was a programmer in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts. One day, he was having difficulty adding some new software features to one of the printers in the lab. He called the manufacturer and asked if he could get access to the source code of the printer driver. Naturally, the company refused. Back then, as now, major software corporations did not make source code readily available. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for Stallman. He was not able to solve his problem, and abandoned the effort. Shortly after, he left MIT and set out with a stern resolve to create a collaborative software development world, a world where software could be shared and all programmers everywhere could contribute their ideas, share code, and add code to software projects. The source code would be made available to anyone. The Open Source movement was born. But like most cultural movements, it took a long time to reach saturation point—about 20 years. Only in the last few years has it suddenly become very popular.

Without the Internet, the entire Open Source movement would be invisible and would have only a fraction of its current impact. Early shareware and freeware was distributed via bulletin boards before the Internet, but the ability for communities to share information and work together as part of a global community has been the provenance of the Internet.

More importantly, despite Microsoft, IBM, and other proprietary software suppliers' rapid involvement, the Internet started life as openly as possible, with shared code as the normal mode. The original U.S. Defense contracts for the Internet had as part of their goal the linking together of very different proprietary hardware and software architectures that resided in defense companies and universities worldwide. By design, therefore, the software of the Internet had to be open and not only shareable, but also designed to add modules rapidly and easily. Communities of bright developers all over the world became involved and worked together to solve problems. It is this community that has spawned and inspired the players working in the Open Source movement.

Today, the Internet is full of open source software in heavy commercial use. Without open source, there would be no Internet. Some of the most popular open source products in use today are briefly described here by categories:

Operating Systems

  • LINUX is the most used Unix-like operating system on the planet. Versions have run on anything from handheld computers and regular PCs to the world's most powerful supercomputers. Linux is widely distributed among different vendors.

  • FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD are all based on the Berkeley Systems Distribution of UNIX, developed at the University of California, Berkeley. Another BSD-based open source project is Darwin, which is the base of Apple's Mac OS X.

Many of the router boxes and root DNS servers on the Internet that keep the Internet working are based on one of the BSDs or on Linux. Microsoft keeps BSD boxes hidden behind the scenes, in order to keep their Hotmail and MSN services working—a fact not generally known. Not surprisingly, most of the software on top of the operating system that keeps the Internet humming is also open source.

Internet

  • Apache runs over 50 percent of the world's Web servers.

  • BIND is the software that provides the DNS (domain name service) for almost the entire Internet.

  • Sendmail is a popular email transport program widely used on the Internet.

  • Mozilla, the open source redesign of the Netscape browser, is retaking the ground lost by Netscape in the "browser wars." It added functionality, stability, and cross-platform consistency that is not available from any other browser.

  • OpenSSL is a standard for secure communication (strong encryption) over the Internet.

The TCP/IP DNS, SSL, and email servers are especially interesting because they're "category killers"; not only are they extremely capable and robust, they're so good that no commercial competition has ever been successful at replacing them as the most widely used product on their respective categories.

Programming Tools

  • Perl, Zope, and PHP are popular engines behind the "live content" on much of the World Wide Web.

  • Powerful high level languages like PYTHON, Ruby, and Tcl/Tk owe much of their success and prevalence to the active community of developers that use them and continue their development.

  • The GNU compilers and tools (GCC, Make, Autoconf and Automake, and others) are arguably the most powerful, flexible, and extensible set of compilers in the world. Almost all open source projects use them as their primary development tools.

Developer tools are especially well represented, because without open source programming tools, open source software would require proprietary tools to build and maintain it. There are literally hundreds of thousands of popular open source packages, covering every imaginable category of software, and more are being developed every single day. Why? Because free open source software is such a compelling idea that once people begin to understand it, most people want to learn to use, promote, and make their own open source software to share with others. You can also make money using open source software to deliver products and services to your customers.

In a recent survey by CIO magazine, IT executives said, "The greatest benefits from using open source are lower total cost of ownership, lower capital investment and greater reliability and uptime compared to their existing systems."[1] IT executives report that open source provides greater flexibility and control, as well as faster and cheaper application development. All things being equal, many of IT executives surveyed said they "would choose open source for a new implementation over a proprietary vendor solution." The difference between open and proprietary software—and its deeper strategic and corporate philosophical implications—is something that is barely acknowledged in mainstream conversation, let alone analyzed in probing ways.

Amazon


Autonomic Computing
Autonomic Computing
ISBN: 013144025X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 254
Authors: Richard Murch

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