The Evolution of Open Source Software
By Victor Ojewale
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)! How does this term actually affect us all?
Over the past 2–3 decades, there has been a massive shift in the way software is being engineered and maintained and one of the major players responsible for this paradigm shift is open source.
Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design. Open-source code is meant to be a collaborative effort where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes within the community. The paradigm shift caused by open source in software has led to an increase in technological advancement as we will see together in this article.
A holistic understanding of the “free” word used in the case above would allow us to properly understand the evolution of open source. According to Webopedia, “ FOSS programs are those that have licenses that allow users to freely run the program for any purpose, modify the program as they want, and also to freely distribute copies of either the original version or their own modified version”. There is a popular saying that expresses the idea that “good things don’t come cheap” but with the advent of FOSS even the best things are quite free. Majority of the people involved in open source were initially attracted to it because it is free, hence the large and growing community of open source.
The ability to have access to the source code makes it easier for faults/fixes to be taken care of without waiting for a fix from proprietary software providers. Also, the provision that improvements can be constantly made available by collaborators on corresponding open source projects are major factors responsible for the increasing rate at which open source is evolving is due to its “openness”.
The Free Software Movement was started functionally by Richard Stallman. He began his studies in Computer Science in the early 1970s before the rise of proprietary software licenses, and he worked as a researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory through the early 1980s. Having been a member of the academic hacker community for over a decade, he had become increasingly dissatisfied with the emphasis on proprietary software and believed it was a limiting factor that hindered innovation and improvements to software solutions.
In 1983, Stallman launched the GNU Project — an effort to create a complete operating system which would provide its users with the freedom to view, change, and share its source code and in 1985, Stallman built on the GNU Project by founding the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the concept of free software to the wider public. Stallman would also later develop the GNU General Public License, a software license which guarantees the rights of end-users to run, view, and share source code freely.
According to the FSF, for a piece of software to be considered truly “free,” its license must guarantee four essential freedoms to its users:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour.
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The FSF considers any software that fails to meet each one of these criteria as non-free and therefore, unethical. Hence, the basis for this movement was morality but in the 2000s, there was the rise of the Linux operating systems by Linus Torvalds and this led to another era in the open-source evolution. It led to an era of functionality and this was characterized by developing solutions that can compete and even be better than their proprietary counterparts. The development from this era are far-reaching with the advent of Linux Ubuntu to compete with Microsoft Windows, Mozilla Firefox to compete with Internet Explorer as that time and even android to compete with the iOS. This is the era that validated that open source had come to stay and was not leaving any time soon.
The recent inclusion by giants in the tech world has also massively sped up the progress of open source. Companies like Microsoft that acquired GitHub and many other stunning acquisitions by other giants tell of a future for open source. Open source is becoming the order of the day as 72% of companies surveyed say that they are frequently using open source for non-commercial or internal reasons, and 55% are doing so with commercial products. Without any doubt, open source has found its own space in the tech field and the question to be asked is “What should be expected in the next 5 years?”.
Just as R. S. Amblee (the author of The Art of Looking into the Future)said, “technological evolution is the result of our own desire to lead a better life” and since technology is not going anywhere anytime soon, I dare to say that as technology keeps evolving there will be even more rush to open source.
The future is free and open.
References
- Vivek Singh (January 10, 2018). A Brief History of Open Source
- Mark Drake (October 30, 2017). The Difference Between Free and Open-Source Software
- Lawrence E Hecht and Libby Clark (August 30, 2018). Survey: Open Source Programs Are a Best Practice Among Large Companies
- Mike Volpi (January 12, 2019). How open-source software took over the world
- What is open source software? Retrieved from: https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source
