First of all, it really isn’t necessary to understand this in order to make good use of OSS. However, the background to the emergence of OSS is an interesting social phenomenon, has the potential to transform the software development industry, and perhaps most importantly, is illustrative of the way the internet is changing almost all aspects of human communication and collaboration.
The first developments of OSS and the wider “free software movement” were undertaken by lone technologists who generally either didn’t want to pay for expensive software, or believed that such software should be open and available for all to inspect and modify (from an ethical perspective). This argument remains persuasive today – wouldn’t citizens want to be totally free to inspect the software picking winning numbers in a lottery, or counting votes in an election.
This is of course at odds with traditional commercial approaches to “intellectual property” such as software, but also music and literature where ideas and knowledge are protected via patents and copyright to allow their owners to make money out of them. As has been seen elsewhere (eg in music and film downloading), the internet is highly disruptive to existing business approaches, and the legal framework is struggling to keep up, with different laws in different countries (for example, software ideas are patentable in the USA but not in the UK).
Broadly, the OSS advocates believe that the philosophy and ethics of freeing software and digital information for creative use has benefits to society that could outweigh the more obvious advantages from traditional protection and licensing. The jury is of course, still out! However, the take-up of OSS by many large IT companies as suppliers, and by corporate IT users in the private and public sector means the OSS approach is gaining in credibility, largely leveraged by the internet.
In its early days, the web was a broadcast medium - organisations and individuals used fairly complex tools to publish websites which largely sen out their message – most internet use was “downloading content from sites” – this is why domestic broadband today still downloads much faster than it uploads.
However the web is changing - tools like Wikipedia, Youtube, Myspace and Facebook place the emphasis on creativity and collaboration among users. These new websites provide powerful functionality for everyone to use (it’s really easy to build a website on Myspace or Facebook – much easier than using traditional web publishing software). Google actually provide a full set of Office tools (wordprocessor, spreadsheet, etc) online, with the emphasis on collaborating on a document. These phenomena – social networking, blogging, wikis, etc. are collectively referred to as “Web2.0”.
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform [software to do things not just present static information], and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.
Tim O’Reilly
Web2.0 is really shaking up the whole world of communications, media and business services. It’s therefore hardly surprising that in the niche of software development, there are some major initiatives which have been using it for a long time. OSS is one such initiative, and seen in this context, it’s possible to imagine a near future where OSS is the major part of the software we use everyday.
