From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The
open-source model is a
decentralized software-development model that encourages
open collaboration.
[1][2] A main principle of
open-source software development is
peer production, with products such as source code,
blueprints,
and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source
movement in software began as a response to the limitations of
proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in
open-source appropriate technology,
[3] and open-source drug discovery.
[4][5]
Open source promotes universal access via an
open-source or
free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint.
[6][7] Before the phrase
open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of other terms.
Open source gained hold with the rise of the
Internet.
[8] The
open-source software movement arose to clarify
copyright,
licensing,
domain, and consumer issues.
Generally, open source refers to a
computer program in which the
source code
is available to the general public for use or modification from its
original design. Open-source code is meant to be a collaborative effort,
where programmers improve upon the source code and share the changes
within the community. Code is released under the terms of a
software license. Depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify, and publish their version (fork) back to the community.
Many large formal institutions have sprung up to support the development of the open-source movement, including the
Apache Software Foundation, which supports community projects such as the open-source framework
Apache Hadoop and the open-source
HTTP server
Apache HTTP.
History
The sharing of technical information predates the
Internet and the personal computer considerably. For instance, in the early years of automobile development a group of capital
monopolists owned the rights to a
2-cycle gasoline-engine patent originally filed by
George B. Selden.
[9]
By controlling this patent, they were able to monopolize the industry
and force car manufacturers to adhere to their demands, or risk a
lawsuit.
In 1911, independent automaker
Henry Ford
won a challenge to the Selden patent. The result was that the Selden
patent became virtually worthless and a new association (which would
eventually become the
Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association) was formed.
[9]
The new association instituted a cross-licensing agreement among all US
automotive manufacturers: although each company would develop
technology and file patents, these patents were shared openly and
without the exchange of money among all the manufacturers.
[9] By the time the US entered
World War II,
92 Ford patents and 515 patents from other companies were being shared
among these manufacturers, without any exchange of money (or lawsuits).
[9]
Early instances of the free sharing of source code include
IBM's source releases of its
operating systems and other programs in the 1950s and 1960s, and the
SHARE user group that formed to facilitate the exchange of software.
[10][11] Beginning in the 1960s,
ARPANET researchers used an open "
Request for Comments"
(RFC) process to encourage feedback in early telecommunication network
protocols. This led to the birth of the early Internet in 1969.
The sharing of source code on the Internet began when the Internet was relatively primitive, with software distributed via
UUCP,
Usenet,
IRC, and
Gopher.
BSD,
for example, was first widely distributed by posts to comp.os.linux on
the Usenet, which is also where its development was discussed.
Linux followed in this model.
Open source as a term
The term "open source" was first proposed by a group of people in the
free software movement
who were critical of the political agenda and moral philosophy implied
in the term "free software" and sought to reframe the discourse to
reflect a more commercially minded position.
[12] In addition, the ambiguity of the term "free software" was seen as discouraging business adoption.
[13][14] The group included
Christine Peterson,
Todd Anderson,
Larry Augustin,
Jon Hall,
Sam Ockman,
Michael Tiemann and
Eric S. Raymond. Peterson suggested "open source" at a meeting
[15] held at
Palo Alto, California, in reaction to
Netscape's announcement in January 1998 of a source code release for
Navigator.
Linus Torvalds gave his support the following day, and Phil Hughes backed the term in
Linux Journal.
Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement, initially seemed to adopt the term, but later changed his mind.
[15][16] Netscape released its source code under the
Netscape Public License and later under the
Mozilla Public License.
[17]
Raymond was especially active in the effort to popularize the new
term. He made the first public call to the free software community to
adopt it in February 1998.
[18] Shortly after, he founded The
Open Source Initiative in collaboration with
Bruce Perens.
[15]
The term gained further visibility through an event organized in April 1998 by technology publisher
Tim O'Reilly. Originally titled the "Freeware Summit" and later known as the "Open Source Summit",
[19] the event was attended by the leaders of many of the most important free and open-source projects, including Linus Torvalds,
Larry Wall,
Brian Behlendorf,
Eric Allman,
Guido van Rossum,
Michael Tiemann,
Paul Vixie,
Jamie Zawinski,
and Eric Raymond. At that meeting, alternatives to the term "free
software" were discussed. Tiemann argued for "sourceware" as a new term,
while Raymond argued for "open source". The assembled developers took a
vote, and the winner was announced at a press conference the same
evening.
[19]
"Open source" has never managed to entirely supersede the older term "free software", giving rise to the combined term
free and open-source software (FOSS).
Economics
Some economists agree that open-source is an
information good[20]
or "knowledge good" with original work involving a significant amount
of time, money, and effort. The cost of reproducing the work is low
enough that additional users may be added at zero or near zero cost –
this is referred to as the
marginal cost of a product.
Copyright
creates a monopoly so the price charged to consumers can be
significantly higher than the marginal cost of production. This allows
the author to recoup the cost of making the original work. Copyright
thus creates access costs for consumers who value the work more than the
marginal cost but less than the initial production cost. Access costs
also pose problems for authors who wish to create a
derivative work—such as a copy of a software program modified to fix a bug or add a feature, or a
remix of a song—but are unable or unwilling to pay the copyright holder for the right to do so.
Being organized as effectively a "
consumers' cooperative",
open source eliminates some of the access costs of consumers and
creators of derivative works by reducing the restrictions of copyright.
Basic economic theory predicts that lower costs would lead to higher
consumption and also more frequent creation of derivative works.
Organizations such as
Creative Commons host websites where individuals can file for alternative "licenses", or levels of restriction, for their works.
[21] These self-made protections free the general society of the costs of policing copyright infringement.
Others argue that since consumers do not pay for their copies,
creators are unable to recoup the initial cost of production and thus
have little economic incentive to create in the first place. By this
argument, consumers would lose out because some of the goods they would
otherwise purchase would not be available. In practice, content
producers can choose whether to adopt a proprietary license and charge
for copies, or an open license. Some goods which require large amounts
of professional research and development, such as the
pharmaceutical industry (which depends largely on
patents,
not copyright for intellectual property protection) are almost
exclusively proprietary, although increasingly sophisticated
technologies are being developed on open-source principles.
[22]
There is evidence that open-source development creates enormous value.
[23] For example, in the context of
open-source hardware design, digital designs are shared for free and anyone with access to digital manufacturing technologies (e.g.
RepRap 3D printers) can replicate the product for the cost of materials.
[24] The original sharer may receive feedback and potentially improvements on the original design from the
peer production community.
Licensing alternatives
Alternative arrangements have also been shown to result in good
creation outside of the proprietary license model. Examples include:
[citation needed]
Wikipedia is an example of a global application of the open source model.
Creation for its own sake – For example, Wikipedia editors add content for recreation. Artists have a drive to create. Both communities benefit from free starting material.- Voluntary after-the-fact donations – used by shareware, street performers, and public broadcasting in the United States.[citation needed]
- Patron – For example, open access
publishing relies on institutional and government funding of research
faculty, who also have a professional incentive to publish for
reputation and career advancement. Works of the U.S. federal government
are automatically released into the public domain.[citation needed]
- Freemium – Give away a limited version for free and charge for a premium version (potentially using a dual license).
- Give away the product and charge something related – Charge for support of open-source enterprise software, give away music but charge for concert admission.[citation needed]
- Give away work in order to gain market share – Used by artists, in
corporate software to spoil a dominant competitor (for example in the browser wars and the Android operating system).[citation needed]
- For own use – Businesses or individual software developers often
create software to solve a problem, bearing the full cost of initial
creation. They will then open source the solution, and benefit from the
improvements others make for their own needs. Communalizing the
maintenance burden distributes the cost across more users; free riders can also benefit without undermining the creation process.
Open-source applications
Open-source model application domains
Social and political views have been affected by the growth of the
concept of open source. Advocates in one field often support the
expansion of open source in other fields. But
Eric Raymond and other founders of the
open-source movement
have sometimes publicly argued against speculation about applications
outside software, saying that strong arguments for software openness
should not be weakened by overreaching into areas where the story may be
less compelling. The broader impact of the open-source movement, and
the extent of its role in the development of new information sharing
procedures, remain to be seen.
The
open-source movement has inspired increased
transparency and liberty in
biotechnology research, for example by
open therapeutics and
CAMBIA[25] Even the research methodologies themselves can benefit from the application of open-source principles.
[26] It has also given rise to the rapidly-expanding
open-source hardware movement.
Computer software
Blender is an open-source 3D graphics editor.
Android, the most popular mobile operating system (as of Nov 2012)
[27]
Open-source software
is software whose source code is published and made available to the
public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code
without paying royalties or fees.
[28] Open-source code can evolve through community cooperation. These
communities are composed of individual programmers as well as large
companies. Some of the individual programmers who start an open-source
project may end up establishing companies offering products or services
incorporating open-source programs.
[citation needed] Examples of open-source software products are:
[29]
- Linux (that much of world's server parks are running)
- MediaWiki (that wikipedia is based upon)
- many more
Electronics
Open-source hardware
is hardware whose initial specification, usually in a software format,
are published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy,
modify and redistribute the hardware and source code without paying
royalties or fees. Open-source hardware evolves through community
cooperation. These communities are composed of individual
hardware/software developers, hobbyists, as well as very large
companies. Examples of open-source hardware initiatives are:
- Openmoko: a family of open-source mobile phones, including the hardware specification and the operating system.
- OpenRISC: an open-source microprocessor family, with architecture specification licensed under GNU GPL and implementation under LGPL.
- Sun Microsystems's OpenSPARC T1 Multicore processor. Sun has released it under GPL.[30]
- Arduino, a microcontroller platform for hobbyists, artists and designers.[31]
- GizmoSphere,
an open-source development platform for the embedded design community;
the site includes code downloads and hardware schematics along with free
user guides, spec sheets and other documentation.[32]
- Simputer, an open hardware handheld computer, designed in India for use in environments where computing devices such as personal computers are deemed inappropriate.[33]
- LEON: A family of open-source microprocessors distributed in a library with peripheral IP cores, open SPARC V8 specification, implementation available under GNU GPL.
- Tinkerforge:
A system of open-source stackable microcontroller building blocks.
Allows control of motors and read out sensors with the programming
languages C, C++, C#, Object Pascal, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby over a
USB or Wifi connection on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. All of the
hardware is licensed under CERN OHL (CERN Open Hardware License).
- Open Compute Project:
designs for computer data center including power supply, Intel
motherboard, AMD motherboard, chassis, racks, battery cabinet, and
aspects of electrical and mechanical design.[34]
- Lasersaur, an open-source laser cutter.[35]
Food and beverages
Some publishers of
open-access journals have argued that
data from
food science and
gastronomy studies should be freely available to aid
reproducibility.
[36] A number of people have published creative commons licensed recipe books.
[37]
- Open-source colas – cola soft drinks, similar to Coca-Cola and Pepsi,
whose recipe is open source and developed by volunteers. The taste is
said to be comparable to that of the standard beverages. Most
corporations producing beverages hold their formulas as closely guarded
secrets.[38]
- Free Beer (originally Vores Øl) – is an open-source beer created by students at the IT-University in Copenhagen together with Superflex, an artist collective, to illustrate how open-source concepts might be applied outside the digital world.[39][40][41]
- In 2002, the beer company Brewtopia
in Australia started an open-source brewery and invited the general
population to be involved in the development and ownership of the
brewery, and to vote on the development of every aspect of its beer,
Blowfly, and its road to market. In return for their feedback and input,
individuals received shares in the company, which is now publicly
traded on a stock exchange in Australia. The company has always adhered
to its open-source roots and is the only beer company in the world that
allows the public to design, customise and develop its own beers online.[42]
Digital content
- Open-content projects organized by the Wikimedia Foundation – Sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary have embraced the open-content Creative Commons
content licenses. These licenses were designed to adhere to principles
similar to various open-source software development licenses. Many of
these licenses ensure that content remains free for re-use, that source
documents are made readily available to interested parties, and that
changes to content are accepted easily back into the system. Important
sites embracing open-source-like ideals are Project Gutenberg[43] and Wikisource, both of which post many books on which the copyright has expired and are thus in the public domain, ensuring that anyone has free, unlimited access to that content.
SketchUp's open-source 3D Warehouse library
Medicine
- Pharmaceuticals – There have been several proposals for open-source pharmaceutical development,[45][46] which led to the establishment of the Tropical Disease Initiative[47] and the Open Source Drug Discovery for Malaria Consortium.[48]
- Genomics – The term "open-source genomics" refers to the combination
of rapid release of sequence data (especially raw reads) and
crowdsourced analyses from bioinformaticians around the world that
characterised the analysis of the 2011 E. coli O104:H4 outbreak.[49]
- OpenEMR
– OpenEMR is an ONC-ATB Ambulatory EHR 2011-2012 certified electronic
health records and medical practice management application. It features
fully integrated electronic health, records, practice management,
scheduling, electronic billing, and is the base for many EHR programs. http://www.open-emr.org/
Science and engineering
- Research – The Science Commons was created as an alternative to the expensive legal costs of sharing and reusing scientific works in journals etc.[50]
- Research – The Open Source Science Project
was created to increase the ability for students to participate in the
research process by providing them access to microfunding – which, in
turn, offers non-researchers the opportunity to directly invest, and
follow, cutting-edge scientific research. All data and methodology is
subsequently published in an openly accessible manner under a Creative
Commons fair use license.
- Research – The Open Solar Outdoors Test Field (OSOTF)[51] is a grid-connected photovoltaic
test system, which continuously monitors the output of a number of
photovoltaic modules and correlates their performance to a long list of
highly accurate meteorological readings. The OSOTF is organized under
open-source principles – All data and analysis is to be made freely
available to the entire photovoltaic community and the general public.[51][52]
- Engineering – Hyperloop, a form of high-speed transport proposed by entrepreneur Elon Musk,
which he describes as "an elevated, reduced-pressure tube that contains
pressurized capsules driven within the tube by a number of linear
electric motors".[53]
- Construction – WikiHouse is an open-source project for designing and building houses.[54][55]
- Energy research - The Open Energy Modelling Initiative promotes open-source models and open data in energy research and policy advice.
Robotics
An open-source robot is a
robot whose blueprints, schematics, or source code are released under an open-source model.
Transport
- Open Trip Planner - this code base is growing rapidly, with adoption in Portland, New York, The Netherlands and Helsinki.
- TravelSpirit
– a greater level of 'super-architecture' ambition, to bring a range of
open source projects together, in order to deliver 'Mobility as a
Service'
Fashion
- Eyewear – In June 2013, an open-source eyewear brand, Botho, has started trading under the UK based Open Optics Ltd company.[56]
Other
VIA OpenBook is an open-source hardware laptop reference design.
- Open-source principles can be applied to technical areas such as digital communication protocols and data storage formats.
- Open design
– which involves applying open-source methodologies to the design of
artifacts and systems in the physical world. It is very nascent but has
huge potential.[57]
- Open-source-appropriate technology (OSAT) refers to technologies that are designed in the same fashion as free and open-source software.[58] These technologies must be "appropriate technology"
(AT) – meaning technology that is designed with special consideration
to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economic
aspects of the community it is intended for. An example of this
application is the use of open-source 3D printers like the RepRap to manufacture appropriate technology.[59]
- Teaching
– which involves applying the concepts of open source to instruction
using a shared web space as a platform to improve upon learning,
organizational, and management challenges. An example of an Open-source
courseware is the Java Education & Development Initiative (JEDI).[60] Other examples include Khan Academy and wikiversity. At the university level, the use of open-source-appropriate technology classroom projects has been shown to be successful in forging the connection between science/engineering and social benefit:[61]
This approach has the potential to use university students' access to
resources and testing equipment in furthering the development of appropriate technology. Similarly OSAT has been used as a tool for improving service learning.[62][63]
- There are few examples of business information (methodologies,
advice, guidance, practices) using the open-source model, although this
is another case where the potential is enormous. ITIL is close to open source. It uses the Cathedral model
(no mechanism exists for user contribution) and the content must be
bought for a fee that is small by business consulting standards
(hundreds of British pounds). Various checklists are published by
government, banks or accounting firms.
- An open-source group emerged in 2012 that is attempting to design a
firearm that may be downloaded from the internet and "printed" on a 3D Printer.[64] Calling itself Defense Distributed, the group wants to facilitate "a working plastic gun that could be downloaded and reproduced by anybody with a 3D printer".[65]
- Agrecol, a German NGO has developed an open-source licence for seeds operating with copyleft
and created OpenSourceSeeds as a respective service provider. Breeders
that apply the license to their new invented material prevent it from
the threat of privatisation and help to establish a commons-based
breeding sector as an alternative to the commercial sector.[66]
Society and culture
The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a
growing tension between creative practices that involve require access
to content that is often
copyrighted,
and restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing
access to copyrighted content. The two main ways in which intellectual
property laws became more restrictive in the 20th century were
extensions to the term of copyright (particularly in the
United States) and penalties, such as those articulated in the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), placed on attempts to circumvent anti-piracy technologies.
[67]
Although artistic appropriation is often permitted under
fair-use
doctrines, the complexity and ambiguity of these doctrines creates an
atmosphere of uncertainty among cultural practitioners. Also, the
protective actions of copyright owners create what some call a "
chilling effect" among cultural practitioners.
[68]
The idea of an "open-source" culture runs parallel to "
Free Culture," but is substantively different.
Free culture is a term derived from the
free software movement,
and in contrast to that vision of culture, proponents of open-source
culture (OSC) maintain that some intellectual property law needs to
exist to protect cultural producers. Yet they propose a more nuanced
position than corporations have traditionally sought. Instead of seeing
intellectual property law as an expression of instrumental rules
intended to uphold either natural rights or desirable outcomes, an
argument for OSC takes into account diverse goods (as in "the Good
life") and ends.
Sites such as
ccMixter offer up free web space for anyone willing to license their work under a
Creative Commons
license. The resulting cultural product is then available to download
free (generally accessible) to anyone with an Internet connection.
[69] Older analog technologies such as the
telephone or
television have limitations on the kind of interaction users can have.
Through various technologies such as
peer-to-peer networks and
blogs, cultural producers can take advantage of vast
social networks
to distribute their products. As opposed to traditional media
distribution, redistributing digital media on the Internet can be
virtually costless. Technologies such as
BitTorrent and
Gnutella take advantage of various characteristics of the Internet protocol (
TCP/IP) in an attempt to totally decentralize file distribution.
Government
- Open politics (sometimes known as Open-source politics)
is a political process that uses Internet technologies such as blogs,
email and polling to provide for a rapid feedback mechanism between
political organizations and their supporters. There is also an
alternative conception of the term Open-source politics which
relates to the development of public policy under a set of rules and
processes similar to the open-source software movement.
- Open-source governance is similar to open-source politics, but it applies more to the democratic process and promotes the freedom of information.
- The South Korean government
wants to increase its use of free and open-source software, in order to
decrease its dependence on proprietary software solutions. It plans to
make open standards a requirement, to allow the government to choose
between multiple operating systems and web browsers. Korea's Ministry of
Science, ICT & Future Planning is also preparing ten pilots on
using open-source software distributions.[70]
Ethics
Open-source ethics is split into two strands:
- Open-source ethics as an ethical school – Charles Ess and David
Berry are researching whether ethics can learn anything from an
open-source approach. Ess famously even defined the AoIR Research Guidelines as an example of open-source ethics.[71]
- Open-source ethics as a professional body of rules – This is based
principally on the computer ethics school, studying the questions of
ethics and professionalism in the computer industry in general and
software development in particular.[72]
Religion
Irish
philosopher Richard Kearney has used the term "open-source Hinduism" to
refer to the way historical figures such as Mohandas Gandhi and Swami
Vivekananda worked upon this ancient tradition.
[73]
Media
Open-source journalism formerly referred to the standard journalistic techniques of news gathering and fact checking, reflecting
open-source intelligence a similar term used in military intelligence circles. Now,
open-source journalism commonly refers to forms of innovative publishing of
online journalism,
rather than the sourcing of news stories by a professional journalist.
In the 25 December 2006 issue of TIME magazine this is referred to as
user created content and listed alongside more traditional open-source projects such as
OpenSolaris and
Linux.
Weblogs,
or blogs, are another significant platform for open-source culture.
Blogs consist of periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts, using a
technology that makes webpages easily updatable with no understanding
of design, code, or
file transfer
required. While corporations, political campaigns and other formal
institutions have begun using these tools to distribute information,
many blogs are used by individuals for personal expression, political
organizing, and socializing. Some, such as
LiveJournal or
WordPress,
utilize open-source software that is open to the public and can be
modified by users to fit their own tastes. Whether the code is open or
not, this format represents a nimble tool for people to borrow and
re-present culture; whereas traditional websites made the illegal
reproduction of culture difficult to regulate, the mutability of blogs
makes "open sourcing" even more uncontrollable since it allows a larger
portion of the population to replicate material more quickly in the
public sphere.
Messageboards
are another platform for open-source culture. Messageboards (also known
as discussion boards or forums), are places online where people with
similar interests can congregate and post messages for the community to
read and respond to. Messageboards sometimes have moderators who enforce
community standards of etiquette such as banning users who are
spammers. Other common board features are private messages (where users can send
messages to one another) as well as chat (a way to have a real time
conversation online) and image uploading. Some messageboards use
phpBB,
which is a free open-source package. Where blogs are more about
individual expression and tend to revolve around their authors,
messageboards are about creating a conversation amongst its users where
information can be shared freely and quickly. Messageboards are a way to
remove intermediaries from everyday life—for instance, instead of
relying on commercials and other forms of advertising, one can ask other
users for frank reviews of a product, movie or CD. By removing the
cultural middlemen, messageboards help speed the flow of information and
exchange of ideas.
OpenDocument is an
open document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents (including memos, reports, and books),
spreadsheets,
charts, and presentations. Organizations and individuals that store
their data in an open format such as OpenDocument avoid being
locked into
a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their
current vendor goes out of business, raises their prices, changes their
software, or changes their
licensing terms to something less favorable.
Open-source movie production
is either an open call system in which a changing crew and cast
collaborate in movie production, a system in which the end result is
made available for re-use by others or in which exclusively open-source
products are used in the production. The 2006 movie
Elephants Dream is said to be the "world's first open movie",
[74] created entirely using
open-source technology.
An open-source documentary film has a production process allowing the open contributions of archival material
footage,
and other filmic elements, both in unedited and edited form, similar to
crowdsourcing. By doing so, on-line contributors become part of the
process of creating the film, helping to influence the editorial and
visual material to be used in the documentary, as well as its thematic
development. The first open-source documentary film is the non-profit "
The American Revolution",
which went into development in 2006, and will examine the role media
played in the cultural, social and political changes from 1968 to 1974
through the story of radio station WBCN-FM in Boston.
[75][76][77][78]
The film is being produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the
non-profit Filmmakers Collaborative. Open Source Cinema is a website to
create Basement Tapes, a feature documentary about copyright in the
digital age, co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
[79] Open-source film-making
refers to a form of film-making that takes a method of idea formation
from open-source software, but in this case the 'source' for a filmmaker
is raw unedited footage rather than programming code. It can also refer
to a method of film-making where the process of creation is 'open' i.e.
a disparate group of contributors, at different times contribute to the
final piece.
Open-IPTV is
IPTV
that is not limited to one recording studio, production studio, or
cast. Open-IPTV uses the Internet or other means to pool efforts and
resources together to create an online community that all contributes to
a show.
Education
Within the academic community, there is discussion about expanding
what could be called the "intellectual commons" (analogous to the
Creative Commons). Proponents of this view have hailed the
Connexions Project at
Rice University,
OpenCourseWare project at
MIT,
Eugene Thacker's article on "open-source DNA", the "Open Source Cultural Database",
Salman Khan's
Khan Academy and
Wikipedia as examples of applying open source outside the realm of computer software.
Open-source curricula are instructional resources whose digital source can be freely used, distributed and modified.
Another strand to the academic community is in the area of research.
Many funded research projects produce software as part of their work.
There is an increasing interest in making the outputs of such projects
available under an open-source license. In the UK the
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has developed a policy on open-source software. JISC also funds a development service called
OSS Watch
which acts as an advisory service for higher and further education
institutions wishing to use, contribute to and develop open-source
software.
On 30 March 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Health Care and
Education Reconciliation Act, which included $2 billion over four years
to fund the
TAACCCT program,
which is described as "the largest OER (open education resources)
initiative in the world and uniquely focused on creating curricula in
partnership with industry for credentials in vocational industry sectors
like manufacturing, health, energy, transportation, and IT".
[80]
Innovation communities
The
principle of sharing pre-dates the open-source movement; for example,
the free sharing of information has been institutionalized in the
scientific enterprise since at least the 19th century. Open-source
principles have always been part of the scientific community. The
sociologist
Robert K. Merton
described the four basic elements of the community—universal ism (an
international perspective), communal ism (sharing information),
disinterestedness (removing one's personal views from the scientific
inquiry) and organized skepticism (requirements of proof and review)
that accurately describe the scientific community today.
These principles are, in part, complemented by US law's focus on
protecting expression and method but not the ideas themselves. There is
also a tradition of publishing research results to the scientific
community instead of keeping all such knowledge proprietary. One of the
recent initiatives in scientific publishing has been
open access—the
idea that research should be published in such a way that it is free
and available to the public. There are currently many open access
journals where the information is available free online, however most
journals do charge a fee (either to users or libraries for access). The
Budapest Open Access Initiative is an international effort with the goal of making all research articles available free on the Internet.
The
National Institutes of Health
has recently proposed a policy on "Enhanced Public Access to NIH
Research Information". This policy would provide a free, searchable
resource of NIH-funded results to the public and with other
international repositories six months after its initial publication. The
NIH's move is an important one because there is significant amount of
public funding in scientific research. Many of the questions have yet to
be answered—the balancing of profit vs. public access, and ensuring
that desirable standards and incentives do not diminish with a shift to
open access.
Farmavita.Net is a community of pharmaceuticals executives that has
recently proposed a new business model of open-source pharmaceuticals.
[81]
The project is targeted to development and sharing of know-how for
manufacture of essential and life-saving medicines. It is mainly
dedicated to the countries with less developed economies where local
pharmaceutical research and development resources are insufficient for
national needs. It will be limited to generic (off-patent) medicines
with established use. By definition, a medicinal product has a
"well-established use" if is used for at least 15 years, with recognized
efficacy and an acceptable level of safety. In that event, the
expensive clinical test and trial results could be replaced by
appropriate scientific literature.
Benjamin Franklin was an early contributor eventually donating all his inventions including the
Franklin stove,
bifocals, and the
lightning rod to the public domain.
New NGO communities are starting to use the open-source technology as
a tool. One example is the Open Source Youth Network started in 2007 in
Lisboa by ISCA members.
[82]
Open innovation is also a new emerging concept which advocate putting R&D in a common pool. The
Eclipse platform is openly presenting itself as an Open innovation network.
[83]
Arts and recreation
Copyright
protection is used in the performing arts and even in athletic
activities. Some groups have attempted to remove copyright from such
practices.
[84]
In 2012, Russian music composer, scientist and
Russian Pirate Party member Victor Argonov presented detailed raw files of his electronic opera "2032"
[85] under free license
CC-BY-NC 3.0. This opera was originally composed and published in 2007 by Russian label
MC Entertainment as a commercial product, but then the author changed its status to free. In his blog
[2]
he said that he decided to open raw files (including wav, midi and
other used formats) to the public in order to support worldwide pirate
actions against
SOPA and
PIPA. Several Internet resources,
[86][87][88] called "2032" the first open-source musical opera in history.
Other related movements
The following are events and applications that have been developed
via the open source community, and echo the ideologies of the open
source movement.
[89]
Open Education Consortium —
an organization composed of various colleges that support open source
and share some of their material online. This organization, headed by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was established to aid in the exchange of open source educational materials.
Wikipedia — user-generated
online encyclopedia with sister projects in academic areas, such as
Wikiversity — a community dedicated to the creation and exchange of learning materials
[90][not in citation given]
Project Gutenberg — prior to the existence of
Google Scholar Beta, this was the first supplier of
electronic books and the very first free library project
[90][not in citation given]
Synthetic Biology- This new technology is potentially
important because it promises to enable cheap, lifesaving new drugs as
well as helping to yield biofuels that may help to solve our energy
problem. Although synthetic biology has not yet come out of its "lab"
stage, it has potential to become industrialized in the near future. In
order to industrialize open source science, there are some scientists
who are trying to build their own brand of it.
[91]
Ideologically-related movements
The
open-access movement
is a movement that is similar in ideology to the open source movement. Members of this movement maintain that academic material should be
readily available to provide help with “future research, assist in
teaching and aid in academic purposes.” The Open access movement aims to
eliminate subscription fees and licensing restrictions of academic
materials
[92]
The
free-culture movement
is a movement that seeks to achieve a culture that engages in
collective freedom via freedom of expression, free public access to
knowledge and information, full demonstration of creativity and
innovation in various arenas and promotion of citizen liberties.
[93][citation needed]
Creative Commons
is an organization that “develops, supports, and stewards legal and
technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and
innovation.” It encourages the use of protected properties online for
research, education, and creative purposes in pursuit of a universal
access. Creative Commons provides an infrastructure through a set of
copyright licenses and tools that creates a better balance within the
realm of “all rights reserved” properties.
[94]
The Creative Commons license offers a slightly more lenient alternative
to “all rights reserved” copyrights for those who do not wish to
exclude the use of their material.
[95]
The Zeitgeist Movement is an international social movement that advocates a transition into a
sustainable "resource-based economy" based on
collaboration in which monetary incentives are replaced by commons-based ones with everyone
having access to everything (from code to products) as in "open source everything".
[96][97]
While its activism and events are typically focused on media and
education, TZM is a major supporter of open source projects worldwide
since they allow for uninhibited advancement of science and technology,
independent of constraints posed by institutions of patenting and
capitalist investment.
[98]
P2P Foundation is an “international organization focused on studying, researching, documenting and promoting
peer to peer practices
in a very broad sense”. Its objectives incorporate those of the open
source movement, whose principles are integrated in a larger
socio-economic model.
[99]
