My attempt to understand Open Source-Part 1
Since long, I wanted to know more about the philosophy and the force that powers open source. But have been lazy to pick myself up and research on it. My earlier knowledge on open source was the result of half baked information that I picked from occasionally bumping into web sites or from water cooler gossips. Last week, when Anil Gupta, the VP of IEC exhorted each of his employees to brace up open source in a big way and have a crystal clear understanding of Sun's open source strategy, I considered it a befitting time to jump into understanding open source in and out. And this post is the result of my study.
But how does this collaboration work? How has it created such a huge impact in the world of software development? To understand this, we need to differentiate two varieties of open source:
1.The intellectual commons
2.Free software movement
The Intellectual Commons
The intellectual commons form of open sourcing stems from the academic and scientific communities, where collaborative communities of scientist come together through private networks to pool their knowledge and share insights.
Why people share knowledge and work in this way?
"IT people tend to be very bright people and they want everybody to know just how brilliant they are"-Mike, IT systems architect
"Open Source is nothing more than peer reviewed science. People contribute to these things because they make science, and they discover things, and the reward is reputation"-Marc Andreessen, man resposnible for the Internet revolution.(Will share his story in another post)
How did the first ever open source project began?
The first ever open source project in truest sense was Apache, known to be pioneered by Brian Behlendorf . When Marc Andeerssen developed the first generation web browser(till then Internet was just mailing lists,e-mail, FTP), it needed a Web server to host the sites. It started in a forum where Marc Andersson and Tim Berners Lee(known as Father of the Internet) were debating on how all Web technolgies should work together. Behlendorf kept himself updated with the forum discussions.
At that time, Wired magazine wanted to set up its own website that supported password authentication and hired Behlendorf at 10$ an hour. In those days, most webmasters depended on a web server program developed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications(NCSA). But NCSA web servers couldn't handle password authentication on the scale that HotWired needed. Incidently the NCSA Web sever was in the public domain as a result the source code was freely available. Behlendorf wrote a patch to the NCSA code that took care of the password authentication. But it was not Behlendorf alone who was working on patches. Webmasters all across the web were finding it necessary to keep adding patches to support the growing demand. Slowly the patches were building a new modern Web sever in an ad hoc open-source manner.
NCSA in the meanwhile was acting unprofessional. NCSA was not answering to the emails of little working group on patches. They were neither integrating patches neither responding to their feedback. This worried Behlendorf on the future of webservers. He then started to contact the other people who were trading with patches. They then decided mutually, "Why dont we take our future into our hands and release our own web sever that incorporated all our patches?". Since none of them had time to be a full time web server developer, they combined time and did it in a public way that could create something better.
This was how Apache
started. The first open source project
(To be contd...)
N.B. : My desperate attempts to get proper and authentic resource on open source finally found solace with the book, World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. So, most of the things I wrote about open source is picked from this book.
Posted at 04:26AM Aug 20, 2007 by rainmaker in Software technologies | Comments[0]