The dominance of open source software (P.1)

Open source software dominates the IT infrastructure for many years. GNU / Linux and the benefits of BSD Unix types have dominated Internet, Perl and PHP as the dominant development languages ​​of WWW, and Apache has actually expanded its early 80% market share among servers. Web . All these products are open source software.

Software development has changed. The old model brings the success of a software development company: Developing proprietary products, concentrating all technical resources for adding features, hiring a number of employees big . moving to open source software model.

Through the release of the source of the product freely, and the preparation of sufficient technical documentation, potential customers can try it out. The cumulative sales of firms are through providing technical improvements to customers and by providing professional support. That support company may or may not be the same as the company that contributed the original code, so customers are not locked, as they have been under the proprietary software model. For example, support for Tomcat open source application servers is offered to the Ministry (Justice) by software vendors like BEA, Novell, Covalent and Red Hat.

2006 was called "Five Open Source", when the application of open source software increased widely in addition to traditional use in technology infrastructure to replace proprietary products for databases, Content management and customer management CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

The application of OSS in government is now very active in the world. When proprietary and reservation systems reach the end of the useful life of products, the present opportunity exists for replacing them with the combination of OSS rather than launching new processes of RFP for closed and exclusive solutions. The South African government recently adopted open source software, in the case of all software and conversion of existing software.

The South African Ministry of Justice needs a clear strategy to adopt and use OSS. Our suppliers are turning to OSS without our encouragement or agreement; Java is the leading development language and also open source software.

Weblogic is a major information technology provider currently mixing OSS into their products, and Check Point's outer ring firewall runs an OSS operating system.

OSS is software distributed to everyone along with its source code, allowing anyone to use the software, redistribute it, and change its functionality as desired. Often, OSS is called 'free' software, but most OSS still hold the copyright (copyright) and exist to serve commercial objectives such as customization, training, and support improvements. support. So all OSS is 'free to use', but only some OSS is in the form of 'free beer'. OSS contrasts with proprietary software, which is distributed only with executable binary code. Proprietary software is 'closed' in a vast sense that it has no accompanying source code; changes in features, improvements, and bug fixes all occur under the control of the source code rather than the user. Customers are also locked into having to rely on proprietary software vendors to support its products in a proportionate manner.

Open standards are technical standards that are publicly seen and can be deployed by anyone with the necessary skills and resources. It is entirely possible that proprietary software supports open standards; For example, PDF is released as an open document standard by Adobe, but Adobe Acrobat Reader is proprietary software. Some analysts will only use the concept of 'open standard' when at least one OSS implementation of that standard exists, but that distinction is unnecessary from the Ministry of Justice's point of view.

Industry standards are technical standards that are applied by industry-specific characteristics. Since 2007, most industry standard software is proprietary, even when OSS solutions exist. This is especially true in end-user environments, with Microsoft Office software suite and with message systems (GroupWise, Exchange, etc.). An industry-standard software package can be open (like Eclipse IDE for Java development) or closed (like EndNote for research library indexing).

Le Trung Nghia ( Translation )