Open Source

Open source is the latest unruly technology. It lets in fresh ideas. It illustrates the principles to promote open access to the public and design process for different products, goods and resources. Open source projects are managed by individual developers, not by companies. The benefits of open source are the same as the benefits of any other free market: competition between multiple suppliers results in lower prices and more improvement.

A good characteristic about open source is that the key developers can lead but they will not ultimately control the projects. It provides insurance against the loss of key developers and against the developers taking the software in the wrong direction. Now that Microsoft has taken over the software market, the open source process has opened up new paths and an entirely new class of ideas. Up to now, open source development is most often associated with software projects. An example of an open source we use is Mozilla Firefox.

Apache, an open source Web server, is one of the most important and commonly used software applications to emerge from the open source community. Estimates show that about 65 percent of all Web sites worldwide run Apache. The origin of the name was “a patchy server. After the entire technical staff was hired by Netscape, the university-developed NCSA web server was dumped. A couple of users of the NCSA server gathered around and made an informal group that coordinated updates and patches to the NCSA code.