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LA GRAMMATICA DI ENGLISH GRATIS IN VERSIONE MOBILE   INFORMATIVA PRIVACY

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WIKIBOOKS
DISPONIBILI
?????????

ART
- Great Painters
BUSINESS&LAW
- Accounting
- Fundamentals of Law
- Marketing
- Shorthand
CARS
- Concept Cars
GAMES&SPORT
- Videogames
- The World of Sports

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
- Blogs
- Free Software
- Google
- My Computer

- PHP Language and Applications
- Wikipedia
- Windows Vista

EDUCATION
- Education
LITERATURE
- Masterpieces of English Literature
LINGUISTICS
- American English

- English Dictionaries
- The English Language

MEDICINE
- Medical Emergencies
- The Theory of Memory
MUSIC&DANCE
- The Beatles
- Dances
- Microphones
- Musical Notation
- Music Instruments
SCIENCE
- Batteries
- Nanotechnology
LIFESTYLE
- Cosmetics
- Diets
- Vegetarianism and Veganism
TRADITIONS
- Christmas Traditions
NATURE
- Animals

- Fruits And Vegetables



ARTICLES IN THE BOOK

  1. Academic Free License
  2. Adaptive Public License
  3. Advogato
  4. Affero General Public License
  5. Africa Source
  6. AKademy
  7. Alternative terms for free software
  8. Anti-copyright notice
  9. Apache License
  10. Apache Software Foundation
  11. APESOL
  12. Apple Public Source License
  13. Artistic License
  14. Association For Free Software
  15. August Penguin
  16. Benetech
  17. Benevolent Dictator for Life
  18. BerliOS
  19. Binary blob
  20. BK02
  21. Blender Foundation
  22. Bruce Perens' Open Source Series
  23. BSD licenses
  24. CeCILL
  25. CE Linux Forum
  26. Clarkson Open Source Institute
  27. Code Breakers
  28. CodePlex
  29. Collaborative software development model
  30. Collaborative Source license
  31. Common Development and Distribution License
  32. Common Public License
  33. Comparison of free software hosting facilities
  34. CONSOL
  35. Copycenter
  36. Copyleft
  37. Creative Commons licenses
  38. Debconf
  39. Debian Free Software Guidelines
  40. Debian Manifesto
  41. Desktop Developers' Conference
  42. Eclipse Foundation
  43. Eclipse Public License
  44. Enterprise open source journal
  45. European Union Public Licence
  46. Everybody Loves Eric Raymond
  47. Forum Internacional Software Livre
  48. Fedora Project
  49. FOSDEM
  50. FOSS.IN
  51. Fossap
  52. Frameworx License
  53. Free content
  54. Free Culture movement
  55. Freedesktop.org
  56. Freely redistributable software
  57. Freepository
  58. Free software
  59. Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit
  60. Free software community
  61. Free Software Directory
  62. Free Software Foundation
  63. Free Software Foundation Europe
  64. Free Software Foundation Latin America
  65. Free Software Foundation of India
  66. Free Software Initiative of Japan
  67. Free software license
  68. Free Software Magazine
  69. Free software movement
  70. Free Software Song
  71. Free Standards Group
  72. FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software
  73. GCC Summit
  74. Gna.org
  75. GNAT Modified General Public License
  76. Gnits Standards
  77. GnomeFiles
  78. GNOME Foundation
  79. GNU Coding Standards
  80. GNU Free Documentation License
  81. GNU General Public License
  82. GNU Lesser General Public License
  83. GNU Manifesto
  84. GNU Savannah
  85. GNU Simpler Free Documentation License
  86. Google Code
  87. Google Summer of Code
  88. Go Open Source
  89. GRASS GIS
  90. Gratis versus Libre
  91. Groklaw
  92. GUADEC
  93. Halloween documents
  94. Hamakor
  95. Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer
  96. Homesteading the Noosphere
  97. Hurd User Group
  98. IBM Public License
  99. IBM Type-III Library
  100. Intel Open Source License
  101. International Open Source Network
  102. Irish Free Software Organisation
  103. ISC licence
  104. Jargon File
  105. Jimbo Wales
  106. KDE Dot News
  107. KernelTrap
  108. LAMP
  109. LaTeX Project Public License
  110. League for Programming Freedom
  111. Leonard H. Tower Jr.
  112. libpng
  113. Libre Software Meeting
  114. Linus's Law
  115. Linus Torvalds
  116. Linux.conf.au
  117. Linux conference
  118. Linux Expo
  119. Linux Gazette
  120. Linux International
  121. Linux Journal
  122. Linux Kongress
  123. Linux naming controversy
  124. LinuxQuestions.org
  125. LinuxTag
  126. Linux User Group
  127. LinuxWorld Conference and Expo
  128. List of software that uses the MIT License
  129. LiveJournal
  130. Lucent Public License
  131. LXer
  132. MIT License
  133. MozBin
  134. Mozdev.org
  135. Mozilla Add-ons
  136. Mozilla Foundation
  137. Mozilla Public License
  138. MozillaZine
  139. MyOSS
  140. NetHack General Public License
  141. Netscape Public License
  142. NewsForge
  143. New Zealand Open Source Society
  144. NonProfit Open Source Initiative
  145. Non-proprietary software
  146. Nupedia Open Content License
  147. ObjectWeb
  148. Ohio LinuxFest
  149. Ohloh
  150. O3 Magazine
  151. Open Audio License
  152. OpenCola
  153. Open content
  154. Open design
  155. OpenDocument Format Alliance
  156. OpenLP
  157. Open outsourcing
  158. Open Security Foundation
  159. Open Software License
  160. Open-source advocacy
  161. Open Source Applications Foundation
  162. Open-source culture
  163. Open Source Definition
  164. Open Source Developers' Conference
  165. Open-source evangelist
  166. Open source funding
  167. Open Source Geospatial Foundation
  168. Open Source Initiative
  169. Open source movement
  170. Open source movie
  171. Open-source software
  172. Open source software development
  173. Open source software development method
  174. Open Source Software Institute
  175. Open source teaching
  176. Open source vs. closed source
  177. Open-sourcing
  178. O'Reilly Open Source Convention
  179. Organisation for Free Software in Education and Teaching
  180. OSDL
  181. Ottawa Linux Symposium
  182. Patent Commons
  183. PHP License
  184. Pionia
  185. Pionia Organization
  186. Proprietary software
  187. Protecting the Virtual Commons
  188. Public Documentation License
  189. Public-domain equivalent license
  190. Python License
  191. Python Software Foundation License
  192. Q Public License
  193. RealNetworks Public Source License
  194. Reciprocal Public License
  195. Red Hat
  196. Revolution OS
  197. Richard Stallman
  198. RubyForge
  199. Sarovar
  200. Savane
  201. SIL Open Font License
  202. Simputer General Public License
  203. SIPfoundry
  204. Slashdot
  205. Sleepycat License
  206. Software Freedom Day
  207. Software Freedom Law Center
  208. Software in the Public Interest
  209. SourceForge
  210. Spread Firefox
  211. Sun Industry Standards Source License
  212. Sun Public License
  213. Sybase Open Watcom Public License
  214. Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate
  215. Tectonic Magazine
  216. The Cathedral and the Bazaar
  217. The Freedom Toaster
  218. The Free Software Definition
  219. The Perl Foundation
  220. The Right to Read
  221. The Summit Open Source Development Group
  222. Tigris.org
  223. Tivoization
  224. Tux
  225. Tux Magazine
  226. Ubuntu Foundation
  227. Use of Free and Open Source Software in the U.S. Department of Defense
  228. Vores Ol
  229. W3C Software Notice and License
  230. Webgpl
  231. What the Hack
  232. Wizards of OS
  233. WTFPL
  234. X.Org Foundation
  235. Xiph.Org Foundation
  236. Yet Another Perl Conference
  237. Yogurt

 

 
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    ENGLISHGRATIS.COM è un sito personale di
    Roberto Casiraghi e Crystal Jones
    email: robertocasiraghi at iol punto it

    Roberto Casiraghi           
    INFORMATIVA SULLA PRIVACY              Crystal Jones


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FREE SOFTWARE CULTURE
This article is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_vs._closed_source

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License 

Open source vs. closed source

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 
Some information in this article or section has not been verified and may not be reliable.
Please check for inaccuracies, and modify and cite sources as needed.

Open source and closed source (or Proprietary software) are two approaches to the control, exploitation and commercializing of computer software. Open source approaches differ from the traditional model of software licensing by allowing other individuals and organizations to view and modify the source code and in many cases resell the software without providing royalties to the original authors of the software, or under some open source licenses without even requiring that they credit the original authors of the software.

Background

Computer software is an unusual commodity. Once written, it can be copied and reproduced for very little cost, and can have great commercial value. However, the original source code created by the authors, if publicized, would allow anyone to duplicate their work in theory. Traditionally, source code has been hidden from anyone outside the company that developed the software and the code is treated as a trade secret which companies may attempt to patent.

Under the closed source model, source code must be hidden from the public and competitors who might otherwise reproduce or modify the code, either to resell the product or for other malicious reasons. Software companies that follow the closed source model see it as a way to protect their products from software piracy or misuse, from reverse engineering and duplication, and to maintain competitive advantage and vendor lock-in. Closed source software usually is developed and maintained by a relatively small team who produce their "product" in a compiled executable state, which is what the market is allowed access to. Microsoft, the owner and developer of Windows and Microsoft Office, along with other major software companies have long been proponents of this business model, although their business models have shifted with time.

The open source model allows for any user to view and modify a product's source code. Organizations and individuals that adhere to this model believe that the benefit that they gain from improvements to their software provided by the community of software developers is more important then protecting their competitive advantage. Common advantages cited by proponents for having such a structure are expressed in terms of trust, acceptance, teamwork and quality[1].

Open source software is licensed under what is often termed a "copyleft" license[2], a term which emphasizes the license's reversal of the principles of copyright. A variety of open source licenses exist. The two main license approaches are the GNU/Linux license which requires that any software that derives from the software also be open source, and the BSD license which allows derivative software to be sold as closed source products, in return for giving credit to the original designers. Open source can and is commercialized, both by purely open source companies such as RedHat and more traditional software companies such as IBM and Novell. The archetypal open source software is Linux (often referred to as GNU/Linux).

Comparing and contrasting the open and closed source approaches

Collaboration and project management

Closed source projects ("CS") tend to collaborate either only to a limited or peripheral degree with third parties (other than project co-members), or under non-disclosure agreements. Corporate development is usually run by teams or structured groups, with workload, agendas, intended results, and deadlines, centrally agreed, and use paid developers to achieve these goals as required.

Open source projects ("OS") by contrast usually embrace third party involvement with enthusiasm. Project involvement tends to be voluntary for many of those involved, and harnesses the enthusiasm of participants who are usually given in return, freedom to do what they feel best suited to, and allowed to become involved, committed, or (in many cases) learn as they do so. New code is developed and reviewed in a less formal process by many people - in some cases hundreds of thousands, or millions - and since many of these are intimately familiar with the system concerned, the quality of review and final writing tends to be extremely high on such projects and the speed of development can be very fast. Collaborative work is also resource efficient, since duplication of effort is avoided.

CS and OS projects tend to view their priorities as different. CS projects tend to work to deadlines, the date at which (for corporate, market or investor purposes) a new product or update must be released, or a new feature made available. OS projects, lacking investor pressure, tend to be more actively interested in how to do a job well, as well as produce it quickly, and in producing work to a high standard.

Example:

  • Microsoft Windows is closed source, it is the worlds most common operating system and a de facto standard in the computer world. Proponents would tend to agree that almost every version of Windows has been a major leap from previous versions, in practically every area, both in innovation, and ease of use. Because it is developed by one company, it can be centrally managed and co-ordinated, and there are fewer "odd gaps" in its development as such. However against this, a huge effort has gone into protecting and preventing others from benefiting from this work in unintended ways, there has been much conflict over "hidden code" allegations, and security and quality have consistently been criticized by many third parties over the years.
  • Wikipedia itself is open source, both its software (mediawiki) and the actual content, is collaborative. In five years it grew from under 1000 articles, to millions of articles, and its software is continually updated by a developer community that spans the world. The software is as a result very robust, since millions of people have access to it and any untoward happening has been analyzed by many developers at a moments notice. The information contained is broader, more comprehensive and more in depth than any corporate team could produce, and grows extremely fast in quality and scope, there is no censorship or hidden agendas, and there is a huge user base of millions of contributors, however as there is no central control, there are many articles not yet up to the intended long term standard and no article can be 100% relied upon without additional checking by the user.

Commercialization

The primary mechanisms for making money from closed-source software all seem to involve imposition of artificial scarcity constraints on something that, by its nature, can be very easily and cheaply copied and distributed. It has famously been said that "information wants to be free"; closed-source vendors would counter this by saying that "information providers want to be paid". Thus, they impose various limitations on what can be done with their software, first of all by usually not giving customers access to the source code, and then backing this up by restrictions on copying, enforced using both legal (copyright law) and technological measures (copy protection and digital rights management).

Thus, in closed-source software, there is an element of the design which means that the product is designed to prevent the customer from doing some actions that the company feels would result in compromise of their source code, even if this is something that isn't source compromising, or something the consumer wishes to do.

Open-source, on the other hand, abandons all such attempts at forcing the customer to do things in a certain way. Instead, the revenue model is based solely on what customers can be persuaded to pay for of their own free will.

Another important factor in the closed-source revenue model involves fending off competitors (both actual and potential) by continually raising the barriers to entry. Thus, new versions of the software are continually being introduced, with lots of new features being added. Competitors then have to come up with their own answers to these new features (otherwise they will not be seen to "remain competitive"), which they have to reinvent essentially from scratch, which adds to their own costs. Typically these features are added with little thought for their impact on the conceptual integrity of the overall product[citation needed], leading to the well-known phenomenon of software bloat.

Another problem with the addition of these features is that they often add to the software vendor's own costs; when they try to adapt the product to new markets and new applications, then the more feature-ridden the product is, the less flexible and adaptable it becomes. For example, operating systems built on the Linux kernel are available for a wider range of processor architectures than Microsoft Windows, including PowerPC and SPARC. None of these can match the sheer popularity of the x86 architecture, nevertheless they do have significant numbers of users; yet Windows remains unavailable for these alternative architectures, because the cost of porting it would be far too great.

The most obvious complaint against open source software revolves around the fact that making money through some traditional methods, such as the sale of the use of individual copies and patent royalty payments, is much more difficult and sometimes impractical with open source software. Moreover, many see the introduction of open source software as damaging to the market for commercial software. Most software development companies sell licenses to use individual copies of software as their primary source of income, using a combination of copyright, patent, trademark and trade secret laws (collectively called intellectual property rights laws). Fees from sale and licensing of commercial software are the primary source of income for companies that sell software.

Additionally, some companies with large research and development teams develop extensive patent portfolios, with the purpose of making money from patent royalties. These companies can charge licensing fees for the use of their patents in software, however open source distribution creates the potential for an unlimited number of derived works using the patented technology without payment to the patent holder.

This complaint is countered by a large number of alternative funding streams, which are actually better-connected to the real costs of creating and maintaining software. After all, the cost of making a copy of a software program is essentially zero, so per-use fees are perhaps unreasonable. At one time, open-source software development was almost entirely volunteer-driven, and although this is true for many small projects, many alternative funding streams have been identified and employed for open source software:

  • Give away the program and charge for installation and support (used by many Linux distributions).
  • "Commoditize complements": make a product cheaper or free so that people are more likely to purchase a related product or service you do sell (this is a primary reason for OpenOffice.org; Sun gives away the office suite to encourage users to buy their computer hardware). This is similar to The Gillette Company giving away razor handles so they could make money on razor blades, or Radio Shack giving away :CueCat scanners.
  • Cost avoidance / cost sharing: many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share development costs (this is the genesis of the X Window System and the Apache web server).

Increasingly, open source software is developed by commercial organizations. In 2004, Andrew Morton noted that 37,000 of the 38,000 recent patches in the Linux kernel were not created by developers directly paid to develop the Linux kernel. Many projects, such as the X Window System and Apache, have had commercial development as a primary source of improvements since their inception. This trend has accelerated over time.

Additionally, it is worth noting that open source programmers may have non-financial reasons for developing software. An analogy is that of Wikipedia, where people contribute without expecting compensation.

End user support

Computer software is complex enough that users frequently need help with it even after they have got it set up and working to begin with. Software also invariably has bugs in it, which may adversely impact the users' ability to get work done and so need to be fixed. And a user may see areas in which the functionality of the software may be improved, to help not just that user but others as well.

Closed-source software vendors typically provide a "one-stop shop" for all support matters: since the vendor developed the software (and appropriately licensed any included components that were developed by others), the vendor also provides all necessary support functions. Nobody else can provide the level of support that the original vendor does, simply because nobody else has the requisite access to the source code (not just to understand how it works, but to make modifications and fix bugs).

This kind of model works well up to a certain point. However, as the number of customers increases, its effectiveness decreases. The better-known PC software packages of today have customer bases numbered in the millions. With that many users, support needs to be delegated to a group of people separate from the software developers (otherwise the developers would have no time to work on the software). This group increases development costs, and invaritably, not all bugs may be fixed fast enough to remain profitable. Another problem when a closed source project is this big is hackers trying to compromise other users' systems, often outnumbering the bug-fixers. (However, some say that it is easier to find bugs in open source software, as bugs can be more easily found with source code.)

Open-source offers an alternative model, where easy access to the source code allows the proliferation of a multitude of alternative support organizations, each remaining small enough to remain responsive to the needs of its own set of customers. With ready access to the source code, anybody can find a bug or shortcoming in the software, and submit a patch for it all the way back to the original software developers, who in turn can very quickly decide whether the patch is worth accepting or not. It is often said that the more eyes looking for bugs reduce them, and with more people looking for bugs, then looking to exploit them, it is no wonder bug fixes may be faster for open source projects.

Innovation

Open-source software has often been accused of being more derivative than innovative. This is true to some extent, mostly in the desktop arena. For example, GIMP is in many ways a reinvention of the functionality of Photoshop, while OpenOffice.org is primarily designed as a plug-compatible replacement for Microsoft Office.

Many of the largest well-known open source projects are either legacy code (e.g., FreeBSD or Apache) developed a long time ago independently of the open source movement, or by companies like Netscape (which open-sourced its code with the hope that they can compete better), or by companies like MySQL which use open source to lure customers for its more expensive licensed product. However, it is notable that most of these projects have seen major or even complete rewrites (in the case of the Mozilla and Apache 2 code, for example) and do not contain much of the original code.

However, one should not overlook the many innovations that have come, and continue to come, from the open-source world:

  • GCC is a set of compilers for C and other languages, that supports more different processor architectures, for both native and cross-compilation, than any other compiler.
  • Linux is available for nearly two dozen different major processor architectures—more than most other operating systems[citation needed].
  • Apache powers more web servers on the internet than any other program, including Microsoft's own IIS, and yet has a reputation for fewer software problems and vulnerabilities when configured by a competent user, despite (presumably) being of more interest to hackers due to its greater popularity.
  • Mozilla Firefox is a Web browser which has managed to take increasing market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, to the extent that version 7 of Internet Explorer offers many features similar to those already in Firefox. Firefox, however, copies many features from closed-source browsers such as Opera.
  • Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug-in that allows user customization of the appearance and behaviour of Web sites, whether to work around bugs, or to add features that the site creators omitted (inadvertently or otherwise).
  • Beowulf MPI is an open-source framework used for building parallel-processing applications that run on Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. It has proved itself so powerful that Microsoft has adopted it as a crucial part of its own efforts to establish a presence in the supercomputing market.
  • The Gmail Filesystem is a good example of the collaborative nature of much open-source development. Building on FUSE (which allows filesystems to be implemented in userspace, instead of as code that needs to be loaded into the kernel) combined with libgmail, which is a Python library for programmatic access to a user's Gmail message store, the result is the ability to use the multiple gigabytes of Gmail message space as a fileserver accessible from anywhere on the Internet.
  • Perl, the pioneering open-source scripting language, made popular many features, like regular expressions and associative arrays, that were unusual at the time. The newer Python language continues this innovation, with features like functional constructs and class-dictionary unification.
  • dcraw is an open-source tool for decoding RAW-format images from a variety of digital cameras, which can produce better-quality output than the closed-source tools provided by the camera vendors themselves.
  • Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop will use Linux as its operating system. The decision was made after months of discussions with vendors of closed-source alternatives.
  • A number of laptop models are available with a particular emphasis on multimedia capabilities. While these invariably come preinstalled with a copy of Microsoft Windows, some of them [3][4] also offer an alternative "fast-boot" mode based on Linux. This gets around the long time it can take to boot up Windows.
  • JACK is an audio-routing architecture that has been found sufficiently useful to be ported to Apple's Mac OS X.

Compatibility and interoperability

One issue that needs to be watched with software as it evolves is the need to maintain compatibility with other software, whether via common data formats, communication protocols or APIs. Closed-source software has a particular problem with APIs, since old, obsolete ones may need to be supported essentially forever, because they are still being used by other software that has never been updated.

For instance, consider the migration from 16-bit to 32-bit x86 processor architectures. Microsoft brought out its first 32-bit version of Windows, Windows NT 3.1, in 1993, yet it wasn't until 2001, with the release of Windows XP, that it was able to put out a mass-market 32-bit OS that did away with most of the backward compatibility with 16-bit code. Now there is the next transition, to 64-bit processor architectures. Windows XP Professional x64 Edition was released in 2005, but full 64-bit support in the way of applications and hardware drivers still remains thin on the ground, and the migration looks likely to be at least as protracted as the 16-to-32-bit one.

Contrast the situation with Linux. That has been available on a range of processor architectures, including 64-bit ones, since early in its history. Now that 64-bit processors are commonplace in the mass market, all the major Linux distributions offer full 64-bit-native versions, running full 64-bit binaries and using full 64-bit drivers.

User freedoms to exploit software

The politics of Open Source is an area that is so controversial, often even Open Source advocates themselves cannot agree what it should be.

However, one thing all are agreed on is that Open Source software is never designed to prevent users from doing things they might legitimately want to do.

For example, when Adobe Systems released its SDK for Photoshop 7.0 in 2002, it abandoned its previous policy of making SDKs available for free download from its Web site, instead requiring prospective developers to sign non-disclosure agreements before they could obtain the SDK. The reason given was that the new version included trade secrets and other commercially-sensitive information that could not be revealed to all and sundry. Which seemed reasonable enough. Except that, at the same time, SDKs for 6.0 and earlier versions of Photoshop were withdrawn from the site. Surely the argument of trade secrets in version 7.0 could not retroactively apply to earlier versions. Yet this kind of arbitrary exercise of control is precisely the sort of thing that regularly happens in the closed-source world, and that open-source advocates abhor.

Integration and overall "feel"

When people compare the user experience with using Microsoft Windows versus typical Linux distributions as a desktop system, they generally agree that Windows works in a more seamless fashion. Every bit of the system was produced by one company, so naturally the parts work together well. A typical Linux distro, on the other hand, is a combination of pieces from a large number of independent groups: the Linux kernel itself, basic operating system infrastructure from the GNU project, basic GUI functions from X.Org on top of which one may run window managers or alternatively more elaborate GUI environments such as Gnome or KDE, and so on. The Linux desktop experience is very much a work in progress.

But on the other hand, all the different open-source groups have a strong interest in having their projects work well together. They achieve this by having a fondness for open interoperability standards, such as those promoted by Freedesktop.org and the Linux Standard Base.

This cooperation between different groups naturally has to be conducted on a more structured basis than that between different departments of the same company. This turns out to have benefits in some respects. For instance, the Internet Explorer browser is so heavily tied into the Windows operating system that it needs to run effectively as "superuser", with full access to every part of the machine. This kind of situation would be unacceptable in the Linux world, where ordinary user desktop software has no business requesting full superuser privileges; if there is some task that it needs superuser privileges to perform, then it can ask the user for appropriate permissions before performing that specific task, or if that is not convenient then alternatively a suitably-privileged daemon could be created to perform that part of the task, with a defined protocol for communication between privileged and non-privileged code, to minimize the opportunity for security breaches that might compromise the integrity of the machine. Having the entire application run all the time with full superuser privileges is almost never the right solution to the problem.

For another example of why integration needs to be done on a carefully-structured basis, compare the systems for applying updates to operating system installations in Windows versus typical open-source operating systems. In versions of Windows up to XP/2003, updates (patches) are applied to the OS as a monolithic whole [5]:

One of the new features under consideration for the next version of the Windows Installer is the ability to uninstall a patch. Currently you must uninstall the whole product or use a hacky anti-patch style mechanism.
...
Currently patches are applied by MSI in the order they are received at the client, not the order they were created by the author. This can get really nasty in some scenarios, because applying patches in the wrong order can actually result in files being down-reved.

Most Linux distributions, as well as the BSD operating systems, on the other hand, include package management systems as standard. The various components of the installation are carefully separated into individual packages, with clearly-defined dependencies between them. An attempt to upgrade a package on which another package depends will trigger a message to that effect, perhaps with an offer to automatically upgrade the latter package as well. Two packages that do not depend on each other can be independently upgraded, and if a problem is revealed with the new version of one of them, it can be independently reverted, regardless of the order in which the two were upgraded.

And since the package management systems are open-source and public, it is straightforward for third parties to set up additional package repositories (such as Packman for SuSE Linux) that integrate cleanly with the original vendor/developer provided ones

Security

Open source advocates usually believe that open source programs are more secure, mostly because flaws in the code can be seen and fixed by anyone. Different studies reach different conclusions about security through obscurity versus open source. Closed source programs have fewer advisories, but open-source software usually has less times between flaw discovery and a patch or a fix. Also note that proprietary software companies may not always release advisories for all bugs in their software. Closed source advocates, including Microsoft corporation, argue that since no one is responsible for open source, there is no way to know whether it has been fixed. Open Source advocates argue back that no one knows what bugs exist in a closed source product, since there is no one indepenedent and credible checking in depth claims made by its vendor nor any open process addressing problems whose quality can be examined by 3rd parties.

Some people believe that closed source software is more secure than open source software. With any given piece of software, it's much easier for a black hat to find and exploit security holes in any given piece of software when he has the source code than without it. For example, many open source web programs using PHP have serious security problems and although these problems are being fixed, they are only fixed when affected end users prompt the developers about the problem.

Other people believe that open source software is more secure than closed source software. The availability of open source code leads to faster discovery of security issues, and faster resolution of these issues. They point to the exploitation of proprietary software such as Internet Explorer. But others claim that such software is exploited because it has a large market share—making it an attractive target for attackers—and claim that open-source software would also be exploited if it attracted the attention of those attackers. Open source advocates often counter by pointing to Apache, which is more popular than its main competitor, Microsoft IIS, but is also exploited less often. This argument is analogous to one in cryptography: it is believed that a secure encryption scheme has to be able to withstand attacks from people who have access to the code, and that security through obscurity is not a good thing. However, cryptography and software development are very much different things.

Flaws certainly occur in both closed-source and open-source software. However it has frequently been the case that a patch to fix one security problem in closed-source software has created another problem[6][7][8][9][10] or failed to fix the actual problem[11][12], and other times[13][14] [15] a vendor may leave a known flaw unpatched for months or even years at a time. These sorts of issues seem to be less common in open-source software [16].

See also

 
  • Windows vs. Linux
  • Linux adoption
  • Open system
  • Open standard
  • Open format
  • Vendor lock-in
  • Embrace, extend and extinguish
  • Network effect
  • Opendocument great summary of the new OASIS Opendocument format (ODF) to create an open system for business & public sector documents

Quotes

From the European Parliament investigation into the Echelon system (05/18/2001):

"As far as firms are concerned, they should take strict measures to ensure that sensitive information is only transmitted via secure media.... If security is to be taken seriously, only those operating systems should be used whose source code has been published and checked, since only then can it be determined with certainty what happens to the data." report mirrored on fas.org website, PDF, p.83

External links

  • Open source versus proprietary software: a discussion
  • Peru congressman response to Microsoft detailed letter summarizing and rebutting on the Peruvian government's view, why closed source is not seen as being appropriate
Debate
  • Forum Debate a lively and informative ongoing debate over whether or not a word processor application should adopt the OpenDocument format (ODF) included is a discussion of open vs. closed systems, open vs. closed standards, and free vs. proprietary software
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