Open source, De-sourced

The best way to sell your product is to know your product so as an initial blog entry I thought I’d explain my product so that my readers (yes, you) would become familiar with open source software.

Firstly, let’s get to grips with open source. Imagine you’re at home, ravenously hungry. You’re not keen for something already-made, like pasta ‘n sauce, or a microwave dinner. You want something specific; something home-made that you know is going to taste great. What do you do? You whip out mom’s old recipe book, turn to page 59 and voila! Mom’s lasagne with her secret white sauce. All the ingredients are there, with cooking instructions to boot.

Open source can be described as the recipe in mom’s book. The recipe is a source code – a freely available collection of statements written in human-readable computer programming language. This of course relates to software, however there are other types of open source and source codes. Imagine that you turn the page of mom’s recipe book and find the recipe for Coca Cola. This would be living in the ideal world though, as Coca Cola guards their source code more fiercely than Malema clutching onto his reputation.

Pharmaceutical companies use source codes; some are freely available and others are not. The same goes for beer.

So now we know loosely what open source is, let’s go deeper down the rabbit hole.

Open source software has been around since computers were invented, well at least the concept has. Before it was known as open source, it was called free software. The term was coined in 1985 by the Free Software Foundation and intended the word 'free' to mean freedom to distribute and not freedom from cost. Because of the ambiguous nature of the name, it was changed to ‘open source’ by the Open Source Initiative, which was founded in 1998.

Universities have been using freely shared software and collaborated between each other to create new programs and new software systems. The great advantage of open source software is that it allows people to study, change and improve the software.

However, open source does just simply mean access to the source code; there are certain requirements which open source software distribution need to meet, which may be found on the Open Source Initiative site.

More information on the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative will be spoken about in the next blog.

Watch this space.

P.S. I hope you’re hungry