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The three advantages of open source

By David Stewart (Intel) (138 posts) on June 10, 2008 at 11:35 am

I'm working on a paper right now for a conference later in the month.  Part of it is talking to the way the OpenSolaris community works and ways it can improve.

I find myself writing prose that makes me sound smarter than I really am, and I get worried!  Here is my simple analysis of the three practical advantages of open source.  <b>How am I doing here?</b> Does this correctly represent the main advantages of open source?  Comments, please.

• The ability for programmers to see clearly how functions work.  The experience of programming on an operating system or application stack where the source code is available is much more productive than if the source is not available.  Without source code, developers must depend on manual pages, documents and sample code, all of which may be out of date or harder to understand than the source itself.  The author’s own experience as a manager helping engineers program on a UNIX-like system without the source of the system calls or library calls being available shows this major advantage of open source.
• Beyond making programmers more productive, some open source projects enable developers to enhance the code that they are using.  If a function is not available, for example the support for a particular hardware device or optimized alignment of memory, the system can be changed through the use of open source.  Another example would be to make a boot sequence less “noisy” in terms of informative messages or to fix bugs.  The ability to use open source to build an improved product with new or changed features is a major value to some open source projects.
• Finally, some open source projects allow innovations developed to be fed back to maintainers of the project upstream, to raise the overall value of the project as it is experienced by all users.  Clearly work done on a bug fix or a new feature will have greater impact if it is available broadly.  Of course, this now introduces the added burden of assuring that the overall architecture, quality, reliability and compatibility of the change matches the standards set in the project.  When there are differences of opinion between innovators and maintainers, there is often the pressure to “fork” projects or create derivative distributions.

Categories: Open Source, Software Engineering

Comments (4)

June 10, 2008 2:35 PM PDT Doug Holland (Intel) Total Points: 12,580 Status Points: 12,580 Black Belt

Without a doubt open source software provides developers with some huge advantages and you've discussed some major ones above. I personally have a couple of projects that I manage on Microsoft's CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com) open source website. IBM has successfully built many of its Rational modeling tools on the Eclipse platform which began life as an open source Java IDE and is now being marketed within commercial products. Without a doubt this has allowed IBM to leverage huge investments of time and energy by open source developers world wide that big blue didn't have to pay for, some of those developers might be a little annoyed by that and some obviously won't be. Red Hat LINUX is another example of open source software becoming a commercial product and today a license of Red Hat LINUX is in some cases more expensive than a copy of either Windows or MacOS. Before "defecting to the dark side" and moving from the UNIX world to the Microsoft Windows world I was very happy with compiling various open source projects on my Sun or SGI workstations although today I'm definately happier within the Microsoft developer community. Some might say I've been brainwashed and maybe thats true to some degree, but I also remember working on UNIX projects where we had to support the software on many different flavors of the UNIX operating system built sometimes with many different flavors of the C++ compiler and associated libraries. Obviously I don't have that problem within the Microsoft world beyond possibly supporting Windows Vista, Windows XP, and possibly Windows Server. It just seems easier than when I worked in the UNIX world. Granted, in comparison to programming in VI with six terminal windows open with various man pages open programming is much easier in the modern IDE (Eclipse included) but I have no interest at this point in moving to an open source operating system although open source utilities etc. is a different story.

June 10, 2008 2:50 PM PDT David Stewart (Intel) Total Points: 9,435 Status Points: 9,435 Black Belt

@Doug Holland - Interesting perspective. Certainly the near ubiquity of Windows on the desktop makes that a nice juicy target for project maintainers. I forgot to add, I think of these three categories as ways you can *score* an open source project. How well do they do in this areas. Other opinions?

June 10, 2008 11:48 PM PDT Knut Grunwald

I think, there is a lot of truth in the three categories. A lot of software bugs are simply annoiances, which can be easily fixed. The switch from old unix development machines to shiny new windows machines is of course a change to the better. But how would a new machine with solaris and sun studio compare ? It's like a trade in of a 13 year old Mercedes with more than 400000 km for a brand new volkswagen. I would say the volkswagen will be better than this mercedes. But is it better than any mercedes ?

August 29, 2008 12:43 AM PDT Open Sources

i want to know how many Open Sources Software developed tiill date.Who develoed the open Sources Software?

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