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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FSF versus OSI!

To write a comparison between open source and free software first a short definition of each is helpful.

Free software is under the GPL license that allows the user to run, study, change, distribute and modify the program freely. It allows the access to the source code. Also it allows commercial use in a way that it doesn’t limit the freedom of users. It means that a person can sell copies of free software or modified versions of it but cannot limit users to do so. Since the source code must be open for any modification, the source code of the modified version is available and free to use.

Open source has many similarities in definition with free software. As the name implies, the source code is available, and redistribution and modifications are allowed. The difference is that it allows the usage of open source software as a component of aggregate software which doesn’t have necessarily the open source license. As opposed to free software that considers the freedom of user the most, open source considers the freedom of developer to use the open source codes so as to develop a program which might limit the freedom of use. In this way it allows the developer to take more advantage of modifications.

Out of FSF and OSI views, it is observed that free software considers ethical issues and its goal is the freedom of users while Open source by adopting a trademark and considering the companies has gone away from the social movement of freedom.

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Free software and open source

Free software is a kind of software that can be used and modified freely without any limitation. It can be shared and copied among consumers. In free software, usually the source code is available for users and released into the public domain. As far as I know, any software produced based on free software and its source code must follow the free software license; thus any modified version of free software is also free.

The difference between free software and open source software is that open source software has been developed under copyright which enables marketing. Additionally, open source software can have various licenses. It may get available under the public domain or open content licenses that forbid commercial use or allow selling the modified versions.

Apparently, although the terms look alike, there is a huge gap between the concepts. On one hand, free software is a way of freedom for knowledge and originated in a social movement that believes “non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution”. On the contrary, open source brings ethical issues and legal status that could limit the freedom.

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