OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPMENT:
Open source development is an approach to software development in which the source code of a software system is published and volunteers are invited to participate in the development process. Open source software extended this idea by using the Internet to recruit a much larger population of volunteer developers. Many of them are also users of the code. In principle at least, any contributor to an open source project may report and fix bugs and propose new features and functionality. However, in practice, successful open source systems still rely on a core group of developers who control changes to the software.
It is usually fairly cheap or free to acquire open source software. You can normally download open source software without charge. However, if you want documentation and support, then you may have to pay for this, but costs are usually fairly low. The other key benefit of using open source products is that mature open source systems are usually very reliable. The reason for this is that they have a large population of users who are willing to fix problems themselves rather than report these problems to the developer and wait for a new release of the system. Bugs are discovered and repaired more quickly than is usually possible with proprietary software.
If you are developing a software product for sale, then time to market and reduced costs are critical. If you are developing in a domain in which there are high-quality open source systems available, you can save time and money by using these systems. However, if you are developing software to a specific set of organizational requirements, then using open source components may not be an option. You may have to integrate your software with existing systems that are incompatible with available open source systems. Even then, however, it could be quicker and cheaper to modify the open source system rather than redevelop the functionality that you need. More and more product companies are using an open source approach to development. Their business model is not reliant on selling a software product but rather on selling support for that product. They believe that involving the open source community will allow software to be developed more cheaply, more quickly, and will create a community of users for the software. Again, however, this is really only applicable for general software products rather than specific organizational applications.
Many companies believe that adopting an open source approach will reveal confidential business knowledge to their competitors and so are reluctant to adopt this development model. However, if you are working in a small company and you open source your software, this may reassure customers that they will be able to support the software if your company goes out of business. Publishing the source code of a system does not mean that people from the wider community will necessarily help with its development. Most successful open source products have been platform products rather than application systems. There are a limited number of developers who might be interested in specialized application systems. As such, making a software system open source does not guarantee community involvement.
Most open source licenses are derived from one of three general models:
1. The GNU General Public License (GPL): This is a so-called ‘reciprocal’ license that, simplistically, means that if you use open source software that is licensed under the GPL license, then you must make that software open source.
2. The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL): This is a variant of the GPL license where you can write components that link to open source code without having to publish the source of these components. However, if you change the licensed component, then you must publish this as open source.
3. The Berkley Standard Distribution (BSD) License: This is a non reciprocal license, which means you are not obliged to republish any changes or modifications made to open source code. You can include the code in proprietary systems that are sold. If you use open source components, you must acknowledge the original creator of the code.
