Open Source: Part 1

OPEN SOURCE

Although you may have no idea what open source is, or even heard about it, you have benefited directly or indirectly from open source software. You are reading this blog thanks to the server hosting from blogspot.com, which is being run on servers using an open source Operating System (or OS for short) called Linux. In fact most web servers use an open source OS because of the known stability and superior performance. Top500.org keeps statistics about the top 500 supercomputers world wide. A table on one of the pages shows the following statistics:

Operating system Family				Count		Share%			Rmax Sum (GF)	Rpeak Sum (GF)	Processor Sum
Linux				426		85.20%			4897046	7956758	970790
Mixed				34		6.80%			1540037	1900361	580693
Unix				30		6.00%			408378	519178	73532
Windows				6		1.20%			47495	86797	12112
BSD Based				2		0.40%			44783	50176	5696
Mac OS				2		0.40%			28430	44816	5272
Totals				500		100%			6966169.82	10558086.75	1648095

Both Linux and the BSD operating systems are open-source. so over 75.8% of the worlds top supercomputers use open source because of the known performance benefits. Even big search engines and sites (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Wikipedia, Amazon, and others) use open source software. You can find out what OS sites are running by searching for the site on http://news.netcraft.com/


What Is Open Source?

Open-source was started as a branch off of the free software movement. In 1998 Eric S. Raymond, along with others, created the Open-Source Definition along with founding the Open-Source Initiative to promote open-source. The main thrust of open-source is freedom coupled with technical superiority. As such, Raymond's goal was wide adoption, especially by the cooperate world. Open-Source, one of the driving forces of the digital revolution, considerably helped in the development of the Internet along with the continued maintenance of its infrastructure. Without open-source software the Internet would be considerably less developed. Because of the freedom benefits in licensing, source code access and superior development enacted by the open-source ideology everyone should use, share, promote, or even develop open-source software.