Concept of Open-Source Software and Its Relevant Aspects

The concept of open-source has gained significant prominence across the society. It is a commonly used jargon in the world of computers. There is hardly any individual – in the contemporary times – who is unaccustomed to the concept or the approach. In a nut shell, open-source customisation means software whose source code is published and made available to the general public. Thus, anyone can actually

·         Copy

·         Modify and

·         Redistribute

the source code, without paying any royalty. In short, open-source applications are available, to everyone, absolutely for free. In fact, any open-source code is evolved across a length of time, by virtue of

·         Community involvement and

·         Mutual cooperation

This “community” may include individual programming professionals, as well as large business establishments. As such, there are ample precedents of individual open-source programmers turning up as entrepreneurs and setting up their own open-source business establishments.

Open-source examples

·         LEON is a family of open-source microprocessors distributed in a library with peripheral IP cores, open SPARC V8 specification, implementation available under GNU GPL

·         Sun Microsystems's OpenSPARC T1 Multicore processor, which was released under GPL

·         Open Compute Project is a data centre for computers, including battery cabinet, power supply, Intel motherboard, chassis, AMD motherboard, racks and aspects of electrical and mechanical design, etc.

·         As it is evident, a Smartphone is one of the most popular electronic gadgets these days. These devices run on the android Operating System, which itself is an open-source product.

Benefits

Working on open source platform has attained unique popularity these days. There are innumerable benefits that this aspect offers.

·         As mentioned above, these are absolutely free

·         One can – therefore – just download and use this category of software

·         This aspect hugely saves time during the initial stages of any development

·         In turn, it also trims development costs by significant extent

·         As any Open Source free GPL software comes with the right to modify, it can be easily customised according to users’ needs

·         A vast online community, scattered around the world, is readily available for troubleshooting

·         Innumerable versions of updates and upgrades of the software are widely available across the net

·         These updates and upgrades mostly come for free, as well

·         Newer features can be conveniently added down the timeline

·         Most conveniently portable

·         Software coders and developers are readily available around the world those can develop well-tailored applications, based on this set of software

GNU GPL

GPL is the acronym for General Public License. The GNU GPL is the most popularly used free software license that guarantees end users with the facility to download, use, copy, study and modify software. Software that allows these privileges is termed as free software. Tracing back to its history, the license was actually scripted by Richard Stallman of the FSF (Free Software Foundation), under its GNU project.

Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and PHPBB, etc. are some of the most popular GPL licensed software, in the recent times. Each of these applications offers myriads of mind blowing, ‘easy to use’ applications at absolutely NIL cost.