[Bf-docboard] [text proposal] Paragraphs on Open Source

[Avi Bercovich]

Hi All,

I'm new to the list and haven;t (yet) got all the various docbook bits
and pieces installed on my machine. DocBook/XML/LyX etc. is a pain to
install on IRIX :( So here's a couple of paragraphs for Chapter One in
ASCII - the data-exchange format of Kings.

There may be room for a paragraph on Blender as a unique thing in Open
Source as its community bought back the code. But I;m not sure if the
blender example will ever be followed. Claiming that it is the way of
things to come and therefore extra important wrt OpenSource may be a bit
tenuous so I left it out.

I'm also considering writing IRIX installation instructions. If anybody
is already doing those let me know. I'm sure I can find something else
to do :)

grts,

avi

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About Open Source.

Open Source is a set of rules that aims to ensure the free movement of
Software amongst all involved parties. For a full telling of the
fascinating story of how this idea came to be you might want to read
Steven Levy's excellent book "Hackers". For those of us who just want to
get on with Blender here's the short version.

In the good old days computers where chunky big things that needed a
good deal of experise to use. This information was very hard to come by
and involved lots of not-sleeping and eating of bad pizza. Sharing
information and programs was therefore the natural state of things
amongst users. Change came to paradise when people decided there was a
lot of money to be made in computers. Users became clients and clients
became dependent on whatever they had invested large sums of money in. 

Meanwhile, there were also people who really hated to see the spirit of
sharing and community go. Some people decided to keep on sharing, not
too bothered about the fact that this was now piracy. Others decided
that sharing only worked if the software was really free. So a man named
Richard Stallman decided that the way forward was to rebuild all the
necessary software from scratch and make sure that it could never be
'locked up' again. With such software, clients would become users once
more and users would again form communities which was the whole point
anyway. Stallman started his epic programming quest in the mid-80's by
founding the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Its GNU project (1) is now
one of the most important collections of software in the world. 

Arguably more important than the GNU software though, is the license
under which this software is released. The GNU Public License (GPL)
ensures that any software it covers remains free and available to all.
The way it works is that the original programmer gets the copyright to
the software, but he must provide the full source to the user or another
programmer who wants to modify the original source. The original
programmer must also allow unrestricted distribution of the GPL-ed code.
In turn, as long as the user and next programmer acknowledge the
original authorship and all that that entails, further use and
modification is permitted. This form of licensing thus widens the circle
of users it serves, which in turn encourages more sharing. It is
punningly known as 'copyleft'.

Because of the FSF's uncompromising attitude to its ideals and the
consistent use of the word "Free" in all its communications, some people
argued that despite its technical merit Free Software would never make
it big in the Real World(tm) of the commercial enterprise. It is one of
the great ironies of the American way that "Free" with regard to
software has come to mean "No Money involved, we're not interested"
rather than "For the love of a non-proprietary world". The arguments
raged for several months in 1998 and after some bitter fights the term
"Open Source" was coined. There has been a lot of powerful pointing at
suits and journalists since then and now "Open Source" is perceived by
those who matter as the technically excellent not-for-profit anomaly
that can magically reduce the TCO of a company's IT operations. 

Mission accomplished.

FOOTNOTES:
1. Full details can be found at
http://www.fsf.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
2. The Open Source interpretation of the Free Software ideal can be
found at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php. 

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