Open Source in business!

Some companies like Google and Oracle have built or supported open source software in order to make a huge source code available to public to make a balance in the market place and controls the strong influence of vendor competitors. Some like Red Hat and Geeknet are mainly based on open source that are doing business by providing service and support for open source software end users.

Google

Google in addition to many profitable projects which are mainly done by internet search and advertising technologies, hosts and supports many open source activities as well. It tries to have a good relationship with open source community as well as releasing some Google created source codes. “Google summer of code” and “Google code-in” are two examples of Google attempts in Open source.

Google open source attempt is mostly known for developing Android that was released as a competitor of iphone as an operating system for mobile devices. It was released under the Apache 2.0 license and the source code is open for developers to be able to develop applications for the Android system.

Oracle

Oracle also tries to have some influence by joining the open source activities since many users utilize Oracle along with some other open source technologies. The company’s attempts in this regard are questioned though because of some restrictions it made for the open source software it supports. For instace, MySQL and OpenOffice are the examples that are supported by Oracle after the purchase of Sun Microsystems. Oracle went under criticism of some open source fans because of the changes of policy toward these software.

Geeknet

Geeknet, Inc. is the new name for a company that was named formerly as VA Research. When VA research was founded in 1993, the initial business was based on making personal computers which had Linux as their operating system installed on them. At that time, they were the most profitable vendors offering pre-installed Linux computers. As a competitor of UNIX at the beginning, the company could sell the systems working with Linux much cheaper than other alternatives. The hardware pieces that were chosen were fully adopted to work with Linux operating system; that’s why it could work faster and gain success in the market.

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Copyleft!

Copyleft as opposed to copyright used to reserve all rights so as to distribute and use software free and also would be the same for modified versions of it

Copyleft has three variations: Strong, weak, and absent:

Strong copyleft preserve exactly the same license for all the derivative works. It means that any modifications of a software with copyleft license would have the same conditions and totally free to use, distribute, copy, and change. This variant of copyleft would limit the most the production of proprietary software from the free one. GNU General Public License was the first copyleft license. For the first time GNU used this term that nobody can limit the freedom of users by applying any restrictions.

Weak copyleft license does not allow that all the copyleft rights transmit to derivates of copylefted software. LGPL or GNU Library General Public License was given to the GNU C library. The strategy for this program and also the similar library ones is to use LGPL license to allow it to compile with a proprietary program. In this strategy, both proprietary and free software developers have the equal right to take advantage of library programs.

Absent copyleft is used for the kind that derived program is not free that has BSD licenses. BSD license allows proprietary activities and compilation with proprietary software. Apache license is a good example of a BSD alike. For instance, Apache allows be compiling, using and distributing in both free and proprietary programs. Stronghold is a software created by C2Net that combines Apache with a commercial software. Stronghold is sold by Red Hat and is commercially licensed.

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