Showing posts with label Open Source. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Open Source. Show all posts
20110524
Free Software vs Open-source Software
I only provide this video to educate open-minded computer users on the difference between open-source software and free software as defined by Richard Stallman.
Free software means that you get the source code along with the program, and are free to examine, modify and use that program. As well, the software is free of proprietary code i.e. contain no code which is hidden by a corporation to protect intellectual property used to profit said corporation.
The biggest difference between open-source software and free software is this:
The term “open source” software is used by some people to mean more or less the same category as free software. It is not exactly the same class of software: they accept some licenses that we consider too restrictive, and there are free software licenses they have not accepted. However, the differences in extension of the category are small: nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free. — Free Software Foundation (FSF), http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
Free software is not freeware.
Most flavors of Linux are composed almost entirely of free software.
Yet gNewSense is the only operating system which meets the FSF's strict guidelines for free software.
How Exposure to Open Source Has Set Me Free
While using Linux for exclusively for the past 5 years, I've been exposed to the concept of Open Source software (open-source software).
Open Source software is that it is free, and comes with source code.
In brief, Open Source is software that sets you free. Over the past 10 years I have used Debian Linux and FreeBSD, having installed it on low end PC computers. As well, I have installed Knoppix on PCs on which Window XP would not installed.
So my computer experience would be considered to be advanced and extensive by a few people. Though, I view my experience as intermediate, since there is so much more to learn.
As an advanced computer user, I would have no exclusive preference for any kind of operating system since I would feel comfortable using Linux, OS X, Windows, Solaris, BSD, and Unix.
Thus am I thankful that my experience with open source software has set me free.
Open Source software is that it is free, and comes with source code.
In brief, Open Source is software that sets you free. Over the past 10 years I have used Debian Linux and FreeBSD, having installed it on low end PC computers. As well, I have installed Knoppix on PCs on which Window XP would not installed.
So my computer experience would be considered to be advanced and extensive by a few people. Though, I view my experience as intermediate, since there is so much more to learn.
As an advanced computer user, I would have no exclusive preference for any kind of operating system since I would feel comfortable using Linux, OS X, Windows, Solaris, BSD, and Unix.
Thus am I thankful that my experience with open source software has set me free.
20110112
Shared Source versus Open Source: Talking Back to Microsoft
Note: This is a revised version of my original post on December 04, 2007. It has been corrected and lightly edited to reflect my current position that the Open Source concept liberates the open-minded computer hobbyist to consider all operating system to be equal in their basic use. Although my preference is currently for Linux, I have no issue with the use of Windows. However, my next operating system on my wishlist will be a suitable BSD flavour because it too is more compliant with the Open Source concept. Please read with care over several days. It's long.
Update 20121124.1438
My current computer systems are Crunchbang Linux on my PC and Android on my smartphones. I have yet to find a BSD flavor which boots into a XFCE desktop successfully due to the old age of my computer. However, I do like window shopping to see what Window7 and Windows8 are like.
The following quote is from a transcript of Microsoft Vice President Craig Mundie's remarks on the Commercial Software Model, dated May 3, 2001. While the topic addressed near the end of Mundie's remarks is dated, I will attempt to retort to several of his remarks regarding Microsoft's Shared Source and the GPL-based Open Source software.
Although I am aware that others have replied to Microsoft over the years, I thought I'd reread what Mundie said nearly 11 years ago, and comment on each of the paragraphs of his remarks in response to the overall impression that SS is superior to OS software.
Even though I do not expect Microsoft to ever respond to my commentary and critique of Mundie's position on SS versus OS software, I still have hope someone out there is listening.
If not, then this entry gives me the opportunity to publicize my views on this matter.
Before I start commenting, I'd like to take this opportunity to give a brief history of my interest in computers. It all goes back to 1985 when a friend introduced me to computer bulletin board systems (BBSes). I believe it was on a Commodore 64, an 8-bit machine, but later I'd buy a Commodore SP9000 Superpet and a couple Commodore 64s, plus even a TI99.
About five years later, there's a rumor that Gates said "All you'd need is 64 megabytes of RAM" in reference to the Pentium I. Today, regardless of the platform, your operating system needs much more RAM, in excess of 128MB. Indeed, with respect to Pentium motherboards, 512 MB is barely optimal ; 1GB is ideal and 2GB or more is optimal. With respect to AMD motherboards, 512MB is ideal while 1GB or more is optimal.
It wasn't until 1992 that I could afford my first 16-bit i386 16MHz IBM clone with 4 MB of 72-pin RAM, floppy drive and 100 MB hard drive for about $2000, and play with MSDOS 5.1. Access to computer networks was still through dialup as in the 8-bit computer days of the late 80s and using text, for the Internet had only been a concept an academic in England wrote about in collaboration with a scientist from CERN called the World-Wide Web.
At this one Internet provider, I had access to the Linux command prompt using BASH. Using a text-based interface, it was possible to subscribe Usenet groups and interact with people from around the world, first mainly from the US and then later from Europe, South America and Asia.
Today, the legacy of the Web lives on as the prefix to domain names in URLs and web links. At the time of writing of this article, I used a 733MHZ P2 or better machine with 256MB of 168-pin PC-133 SDRAM, CD-ROM drive and a 20GB hard drive. Today, I use a 2 GHz P4 machine with 2GB of 184-pin DDR RAM, a rewriteable CD-ROM drive with DVD reader, a rewriteable DVD drive, and a 120 GB hard drive.
To help better my knowledge of computer, I learned how to maintain computers as a trade and, in my spare time, learned to administer a LAN, having migrated from Windows to Linux between 2003 and 2006. It was only in 2007 that I fully dedicated myself to Linux, after 3 years of trying out different flavors such as Redhat, Debian, SuSE, Knoppix and finally Ubuntu. As well, I tried FreeBSD and QNX.
While Gates and I only share the fact that we are both college dropouts, he parlayed his interest in computers and electronics into a vast software empire.
However, I honed a growing love of electronics since I bought a book on transistors which was basically the US military's training manual on the subject. Consequently I also breadboarded transistor and later IC chip designs photocopied and written into a notebook at the library in Vancouver.
Meanwhile, Gates was selling software and establishing business models of profit, mainly to gain the respect and admiration of his parents. I on the other hand took the easy yet perilous route to today because for me, status and wealth are almost meaningless.
Today, I live and breathe Linux, and the world is at my hands.
For Open Source has opened up a radical model of livelihood based on the concept that "information wants to be free", and consequently since information is software, "software wants to be free", Therefore I feel that commenting in response to Microsoft VP Mundie's criticism of Open Source - albeit belatedly - is still within my capabilities since my comments address the concept of Open Source Software (OSS).
Why do I wish to comment about OSS? Because Mundie's support of Shared Source software implies a worship of the two things I abandoned a decade before I bought my first IBM clone: wealth, and the power derived from status.
Thus do I liberate myself by freely responding to Mundie. However, this is not done out of any true desire to be on an equal level with him, but to act freely according to the concept of free speech, and thus to express my opinion in a public forum. In doing so, I also endorse the prime concept of Free Software Foundation that software wants to be free.
For Linux is based on Open Source, and is the means of my liberation from Microsoft dependency.
Mundie states:
The phrase "open source software," or OSS, is often used as an umbrella term for a collection of product development, distribution and licensing practices, many of which have existed individually since the early days of computing. There are actually a number of different approaches within this community, but the common traits are providing people with access to source code and allowing others to modify and redistribute that code.
On this point, I agree with Mundie's definition, as he just summed up the history of OSS, its definition and business model in a nutshell.
As a result of Microsoft's statement of position today, many people will attempt to say that Shared Source is Microsoft's failed attempt at being an Open Source Company. This could not be a more incorrect statement. Shared Source is Open Source. We recognize that OSS has some benefits, such as the fostering of community, improved feedback and augmented debugging. We are always looking for ways to improve our products and make our customers more successful, and to that end we have incorporated these positive OSS elements in Shared Source. But there are significant drawbacks to OSS as well.
By stating that Shared Source is Open Source is not true since the SS software community has to "buy" into the SS model. Rather, what Mundie means, is that Microsoft has "borrowed" concepts from OSS and he is trying to confuse us by stating that SSS is OSS. It is not, because if software partners have to buy into SS to get code Microsoft shares with them, SS is not open because OSS and the concept that software wants to be free are implicit.
I suspect Mundie is trying to say that SSS is OSS in order to create cognitive dissonance in knowledgeable people who know that OSS means "software wants to be free". For SSS is anything other than free.
The OSS development model leads to a strong possibility of unhealthy "forking" of a code base, resulting in the development of multiple incompatible versions of programs, weakened interoperability, product instability, and hindering businesses ability to strategically plan for the future. Furthermore, it has inherent security risks and can force intellectual property into the public domain.
I question Mundie's use of the word "unhealthy" but assume that he means forking of a code base is economically unhealthy. It's like upgrading to a new computer but still using both to accumulate data. Unless a method of syncing data on both computers is implemented, the newer computer's data will fork off from the previous compuer's data. One could sync the sources of data from the old computer to the new one, and recycle the old computer.
With respect to software, forks usually occur when the current upgrade stops supporting previous versions. Thus Windows forked off from MSDOS when Windows 2000 was created and forked off again with WIN95/98 and OS/2. As well, XP forked off between Home and Professional, and Vista forked off from XP. With everything before XP being discontinued after 2010, WIN95/98 will become a dead fork. This is from an Operating System point of view, though. Apparently the file formats are still compatible between discontinued WIN95/98, XP and Vista.
However, RTF format forked off from its earliest incarnation RTF 1.0 1987 with most applications being unable to read correctly documents made with Word 3 for Window 3.0.
Inspired by Tex and Adobe Postscript, Microsoft created an RTF module for Windows Word to interface with the kernel to provide "enriched text" using its proprietary fonts and formatting. Even if the OSS community reverse-engineers RTF, there was no guarantee of a good match of "look-and-feel".
Judging from the inability of OpenOffice to accurately read a Microsoft RTF document, I can only conclude that reverse-engineering RTF (a copyrighted format) would violate OSS ideology.
My guess is that the OSS community would not buy into Microsoft's SSS program since its copyright policy makes closed source implicit. If Microsoft truly followed OSS protocols with SSS, then they should "free" RTF and be more implicit with the directives so that default fonts and formatting follow an OSS-like protocol.
Note: This actually happened as of March 2008 for Word 12 with the introduction of RTF 1.9.1 2008.
Some of the most successful OSS technology is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it. It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.
The threat Mundie states posed by the viral aspect of the GPL is also economic. What he means when he explains how that aspect "undermines the independent commercial software sector" is that that "viral aspect of the GPL" would affect the financial health of the commercial software sector.
However, it is the GPL that Mundie finds unhealthy to the bottom line of that sector within which Microsoft excells. As well, he is dishonest in suggesting that recipients will pay "just for the cost of distribution". For recipients also pay for the cost of support, which is not the same as distribution since it is mainly service. Upgrades are still part of distribution. Having tech support talk you through the configuration and use of software is not distribution. Yet a recipient who only pays for distribution will be affected greatly if an upgrade crashes their LAN and their IT manager is unable to service it because no one in accounting bought into a workable support plan offered by Microsoft or a third party equivalent of customer support.
OSS only frees the software so that a software company can easily distribute and maintain through support for a price. Both distribution and support allow enough feedback to get back to the software engineers to help them create an increasingly improved upgrade. They are not getting "cheated" of compensation for their hard work creating software since they could also wear hats for distribution and support, thus adding an extremely valuable skillset to their CV by dealing with customers.
In this sense, open source software based on the GPL mirrors the .com business models that proved the least successful during the past year. They ask software developers to give away for free the very thing they create that is of greatest value in the hope that somehow they'll make money selling something else. In effect, it puts at risk the continued vitality of the independent software sector. The business model for OSS may well be attractive for software as an adjunct to hardware the model of the 60s and 70s or for service businesses that do not generate the revenue needed for major investments in technology. But as history has shown, while this type of model may have a place, it isn't successful in building a mass market and making powerful, easy-to-use software broadly accessible to consumers.
Mundie again is assuming that we know what "least successful" means i.e. resulting in losses of revenue. .COM was still successful since it followed the SSS=OSS paradigm to the letter, which resulted in greater distribution but sometomes woefully inadequate support.
In contrast, two decades of experience have shown that an economic model that protects intellectual property and a business model that recoups research and development costs have shown repeatedly that they can create impressive economic benefits and distribute them very broadly.
In short, closed source software equals big bucks. So why are a few users of Microsoft products complaining about getting dinged for support while desiring "ease of use"?
Finally, the fact that we believe strongly in the value of IP protection doesn't mean that we discount the importance of contributing to and supporting the public domain of knowledge as well. We believe that interaction between the public domain and the IP-based sector needs to be based on mutual responsibility and respect.
What Mundie means is "don't steal or reverse-engineer our code". Responsibility here implies the financial one of paying to get to access to their SSS, while respect means "respect the fact that Microsoft SSS is OSS that comes with a price".
There is an important and longstanding tradition for the public domain of knowledge, or "intellectual commons." This is reflected in many ways, including federal support for basic research, the limitations on IP rights reflected in the law and, more recently, the broad practice of contributing technology to public standards groups for the continued development of the Internet. We support this and want to continue to be a constructive and responsible participant in this community, including making contributions to public standards. There is an equally important tradition of commercial companies having the opportunity to benefit from and apply this public knowledge, including by developing commercial products that are protected by IP rights. There are many examples of this, including the many products that grew from research in the space program and the advances in speech recognition technology that followed work done at pre-eminent institutions such as Carnegie Mellon.
"Limitation on IP rights reflected in the law" refers to laws regarding Digital Rights Management which led to MPAA and RIAA rulings that allows them to sue a widow who uses a MAC with no access to p2p software, just because she ripped one music CD onto her computer for personal use, and iTunes reported her. It's another cash grab like the one for software products.
The GPL asserts that any product derived from source code licensed under it becomes subject to the GPL itself. When the resulting software product is distributed, the creator must make all of the source code available, at no additional charge. This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor. As we think about technology, IP rights, and the public sector of knowledge, we need an intellectual model that encourages interaction, not a model that drives them apart. We believe that a shared source model, coupled with continuing contributions to public standards, provides a path that is preferable to the open source approach founded on the GPL.
Microsoft believes "that a shared source model, coupled with continuing contributions to public standards, provides a path that is preferable to the open source approach founded on the GPL." By stating this Mundie contradicts his earlier statement that "SSS is OSS".
SSS based on a license that is not the GPL is not really OSS, for the GPL is what makes it open and thus "frees" it from closed source "tyranny".
GPL liberates OSS by including source code with it. Think of GPL as the Emancipation Proclamation. Consider Microsoft's SSS licensing akin to Southern laws involving slavery.
As of October 2007, Microsoft added its Public License (Ms-PL), renaming it from Microsoft Permissive Licence to Microsoft Public Licence while under review by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). While the Free Software Foundation calls it a free software licence, they make it clear that the Ms-PL is not compatible with the GPL. Indeed, even Microsoft Reciprocal Licence (originally Microsoft Community Licence)is not compatioble with the GPL.
For more information on Shared Source Software, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source
For more information on Open Source Software, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
Originally posted: 04/12/07 8:11 PM
Current update: 12/01/11 2:46 PM
Update 20121124.1438
My current computer systems are Crunchbang Linux on my PC and Android on my smartphones. I have yet to find a BSD flavor which boots into a XFCE desktop successfully due to the old age of my computer. However, I do like window shopping to see what Window7 and Windows8 are like.
The following quote is from a transcript of Microsoft Vice President Craig Mundie's remarks on the Commercial Software Model, dated May 3, 2001. While the topic addressed near the end of Mundie's remarks is dated, I will attempt to retort to several of his remarks regarding Microsoft's Shared Source and the GPL-based Open Source software.
Although I am aware that others have replied to Microsoft over the years, I thought I'd reread what Mundie said nearly 11 years ago, and comment on each of the paragraphs of his remarks in response to the overall impression that SS is superior to OS software.
Even though I do not expect Microsoft to ever respond to my commentary and critique of Mundie's position on SS versus OS software, I still have hope someone out there is listening.
If not, then this entry gives me the opportunity to publicize my views on this matter.
Before I start commenting, I'd like to take this opportunity to give a brief history of my interest in computers. It all goes back to 1985 when a friend introduced me to computer bulletin board systems (BBSes). I believe it was on a Commodore 64, an 8-bit machine, but later I'd buy a Commodore SP9000 Superpet and a couple Commodore 64s, plus even a TI99.
About five years later, there's a rumor that Gates said "All you'd need is 64 megabytes of RAM" in reference to the Pentium I. Today, regardless of the platform, your operating system needs much more RAM, in excess of 128MB. Indeed, with respect to Pentium motherboards, 512 MB is barely optimal ; 1GB is ideal and 2GB or more is optimal. With respect to AMD motherboards, 512MB is ideal while 1GB or more is optimal.
It wasn't until 1992 that I could afford my first 16-bit i386 16MHz IBM clone with 4 MB of 72-pin RAM, floppy drive and 100 MB hard drive for about $2000, and play with MSDOS 5.1. Access to computer networks was still through dialup as in the 8-bit computer days of the late 80s and using text, for the Internet had only been a concept an academic in England wrote about in collaboration with a scientist from CERN called the World-Wide Web.
At this one Internet provider, I had access to the Linux command prompt using BASH. Using a text-based interface, it was possible to subscribe Usenet groups and interact with people from around the world, first mainly from the US and then later from Europe, South America and Asia.
Today, the legacy of the Web lives on as the prefix to domain names in URLs and web links. At the time of writing of this article, I used a 733MHZ P2 or better machine with 256MB of 168-pin PC-133 SDRAM, CD-ROM drive and a 20GB hard drive. Today, I use a 2 GHz P4 machine with 2GB of 184-pin DDR RAM, a rewriteable CD-ROM drive with DVD reader, a rewriteable DVD drive, and a 120 GB hard drive.
To help better my knowledge of computer, I learned how to maintain computers as a trade and, in my spare time, learned to administer a LAN, having migrated from Windows to Linux between 2003 and 2006. It was only in 2007 that I fully dedicated myself to Linux, after 3 years of trying out different flavors such as Redhat, Debian, SuSE, Knoppix and finally Ubuntu. As well, I tried FreeBSD and QNX.
While Gates and I only share the fact that we are both college dropouts, he parlayed his interest in computers and electronics into a vast software empire.
However, I honed a growing love of electronics since I bought a book on transistors which was basically the US military's training manual on the subject. Consequently I also breadboarded transistor and later IC chip designs photocopied and written into a notebook at the library in Vancouver.
Meanwhile, Gates was selling software and establishing business models of profit, mainly to gain the respect and admiration of his parents. I on the other hand took the easy yet perilous route to today because for me, status and wealth are almost meaningless.
Today, I live and breathe Linux, and the world is at my hands.
For Open Source has opened up a radical model of livelihood based on the concept that "information wants to be free", and consequently since information is software, "software wants to be free", Therefore I feel that commenting in response to Microsoft VP Mundie's criticism of Open Source - albeit belatedly - is still within my capabilities since my comments address the concept of Open Source Software (OSS).
Why do I wish to comment about OSS? Because Mundie's support of Shared Source software implies a worship of the two things I abandoned a decade before I bought my first IBM clone: wealth, and the power derived from status.
Thus do I liberate myself by freely responding to Mundie. However, this is not done out of any true desire to be on an equal level with him, but to act freely according to the concept of free speech, and thus to express my opinion in a public forum. In doing so, I also endorse the prime concept of Free Software Foundation that software wants to be free.
For Linux is based on Open Source, and is the means of my liberation from Microsoft dependency.
Mundie states:
The phrase "open source software," or OSS, is often used as an umbrella term for a collection of product development, distribution and licensing practices, many of which have existed individually since the early days of computing. There are actually a number of different approaches within this community, but the common traits are providing people with access to source code and allowing others to modify and redistribute that code.
On this point, I agree with Mundie's definition, as he just summed up the history of OSS, its definition and business model in a nutshell.
As a result of Microsoft's statement of position today, many people will attempt to say that Shared Source is Microsoft's failed attempt at being an Open Source Company. This could not be a more incorrect statement. Shared Source is Open Source. We recognize that OSS has some benefits, such as the fostering of community, improved feedback and augmented debugging. We are always looking for ways to improve our products and make our customers more successful, and to that end we have incorporated these positive OSS elements in Shared Source. But there are significant drawbacks to OSS as well.
By stating that Shared Source is Open Source is not true since the SS software community has to "buy" into the SS model. Rather, what Mundie means, is that Microsoft has "borrowed" concepts from OSS and he is trying to confuse us by stating that SSS is OSS. It is not, because if software partners have to buy into SS to get code Microsoft shares with them, SS is not open because OSS and the concept that software wants to be free are implicit.
I suspect Mundie is trying to say that SSS is OSS in order to create cognitive dissonance in knowledgeable people who know that OSS means "software wants to be free". For SSS is anything other than free.
The OSS development model leads to a strong possibility of unhealthy "forking" of a code base, resulting in the development of multiple incompatible versions of programs, weakened interoperability, product instability, and hindering businesses ability to strategically plan for the future. Furthermore, it has inherent security risks and can force intellectual property into the public domain.
I question Mundie's use of the word "unhealthy" but assume that he means forking of a code base is economically unhealthy. It's like upgrading to a new computer but still using both to accumulate data. Unless a method of syncing data on both computers is implemented, the newer computer's data will fork off from the previous compuer's data. One could sync the sources of data from the old computer to the new one, and recycle the old computer.
With respect to software, forks usually occur when the current upgrade stops supporting previous versions. Thus Windows forked off from MSDOS when Windows 2000 was created and forked off again with WIN95/98 and OS/2. As well, XP forked off between Home and Professional, and Vista forked off from XP. With everything before XP being discontinued after 2010, WIN95/98 will become a dead fork. This is from an Operating System point of view, though. Apparently the file formats are still compatible between discontinued WIN95/98, XP and Vista.
However, RTF format forked off from its earliest incarnation RTF 1.0 1987 with most applications being unable to read correctly documents made with Word 3 for Window 3.0.
Inspired by Tex and Adobe Postscript, Microsoft created an RTF module for Windows Word to interface with the kernel to provide "enriched text" using its proprietary fonts and formatting. Even if the OSS community reverse-engineers RTF, there was no guarantee of a good match of "look-and-feel".
Judging from the inability of OpenOffice to accurately read a Microsoft RTF document, I can only conclude that reverse-engineering RTF (a copyrighted format) would violate OSS ideology.
My guess is that the OSS community would not buy into Microsoft's SSS program since its copyright policy makes closed source implicit. If Microsoft truly followed OSS protocols with SSS, then they should "free" RTF and be more implicit with the directives so that default fonts and formatting follow an OSS-like protocol.
Note: This actually happened as of March 2008 for Word 12 with the introduction of RTF 1.9.1 2008.
Some of the most successful OSS technology is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it. It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution.
The threat Mundie states posed by the viral aspect of the GPL is also economic. What he means when he explains how that aspect "undermines the independent commercial software sector" is that that "viral aspect of the GPL" would affect the financial health of the commercial software sector.
However, it is the GPL that Mundie finds unhealthy to the bottom line of that sector within which Microsoft excells. As well, he is dishonest in suggesting that recipients will pay "just for the cost of distribution". For recipients also pay for the cost of support, which is not the same as distribution since it is mainly service. Upgrades are still part of distribution. Having tech support talk you through the configuration and use of software is not distribution. Yet a recipient who only pays for distribution will be affected greatly if an upgrade crashes their LAN and their IT manager is unable to service it because no one in accounting bought into a workable support plan offered by Microsoft or a third party equivalent of customer support.
OSS only frees the software so that a software company can easily distribute and maintain through support for a price. Both distribution and support allow enough feedback to get back to the software engineers to help them create an increasingly improved upgrade. They are not getting "cheated" of compensation for their hard work creating software since they could also wear hats for distribution and support, thus adding an extremely valuable skillset to their CV by dealing with customers.
In this sense, open source software based on the GPL mirrors the .com business models that proved the least successful during the past year. They ask software developers to give away for free the very thing they create that is of greatest value in the hope that somehow they'll make money selling something else. In effect, it puts at risk the continued vitality of the independent software sector. The business model for OSS may well be attractive for software as an adjunct to hardware the model of the 60s and 70s or for service businesses that do not generate the revenue needed for major investments in technology. But as history has shown, while this type of model may have a place, it isn't successful in building a mass market and making powerful, easy-to-use software broadly accessible to consumers.
Mundie again is assuming that we know what "least successful" means i.e. resulting in losses of revenue. .COM was still successful since it followed the SSS=OSS paradigm to the letter, which resulted in greater distribution but sometomes woefully inadequate support.
In contrast, two decades of experience have shown that an economic model that protects intellectual property and a business model that recoups research and development costs have shown repeatedly that they can create impressive economic benefits and distribute them very broadly.
In short, closed source software equals big bucks. So why are a few users of Microsoft products complaining about getting dinged for support while desiring "ease of use"?
Finally, the fact that we believe strongly in the value of IP protection doesn't mean that we discount the importance of contributing to and supporting the public domain of knowledge as well. We believe that interaction between the public domain and the IP-based sector needs to be based on mutual responsibility and respect.
What Mundie means is "don't steal or reverse-engineer our code". Responsibility here implies the financial one of paying to get to access to their SSS, while respect means "respect the fact that Microsoft SSS is OSS that comes with a price".
There is an important and longstanding tradition for the public domain of knowledge, or "intellectual commons." This is reflected in many ways, including federal support for basic research, the limitations on IP rights reflected in the law and, more recently, the broad practice of contributing technology to public standards groups for the continued development of the Internet. We support this and want to continue to be a constructive and responsible participant in this community, including making contributions to public standards. There is an equally important tradition of commercial companies having the opportunity to benefit from and apply this public knowledge, including by developing commercial products that are protected by IP rights. There are many examples of this, including the many products that grew from research in the space program and the advances in speech recognition technology that followed work done at pre-eminent institutions such as Carnegie Mellon.
"Limitation on IP rights reflected in the law" refers to laws regarding Digital Rights Management which led to MPAA and RIAA rulings that allows them to sue a widow who uses a MAC with no access to p2p software, just because she ripped one music CD onto her computer for personal use, and iTunes reported her. It's another cash grab like the one for software products.
The GPL asserts that any product derived from source code licensed under it becomes subject to the GPL itself. When the resulting software product is distributed, the creator must make all of the source code available, at no additional charge. This effectively makes it impossible for commercial software companies to include source code that is licensed under the GPL into their products, since by doing so, they are constrained to give away the fruits of their labor. As we think about technology, IP rights, and the public sector of knowledge, we need an intellectual model that encourages interaction, not a model that drives them apart. We believe that a shared source model, coupled with continuing contributions to public standards, provides a path that is preferable to the open source approach founded on the GPL.
Microsoft believes "that a shared source model, coupled with continuing contributions to public standards, provides a path that is preferable to the open source approach founded on the GPL." By stating this Mundie contradicts his earlier statement that "SSS is OSS".
SSS based on a license that is not the GPL is not really OSS, for the GPL is what makes it open and thus "frees" it from closed source "tyranny".
GPL liberates OSS by including source code with it. Think of GPL as the Emancipation Proclamation. Consider Microsoft's SSS licensing akin to Southern laws involving slavery.
As of October 2007, Microsoft added its Public License (Ms-PL), renaming it from Microsoft Permissive Licence to Microsoft Public Licence while under review by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). While the Free Software Foundation calls it a free software licence, they make it clear that the Ms-PL is not compatible with the GPL. Indeed, even Microsoft Reciprocal Licence (originally Microsoft Community Licence)is not compatioble with the GPL.
For more information on Shared Source Software, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source
For more information on Open Source Software, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
Originally posted: 04/12/07 8:11 PM
Current update: 12/01/11 2:46 PM
20080116
Why Software Wants to be Free
"When software publishers talk about “enforcing” their “rights” or “stopping piracy”, what they actually say is secondary. The real message of these statements is in the unstated assumptions they take for granted; the public is supposed to accept them uncritically. So let's examine them.
One assumption is that software companies have an unquestionable natural right to own software and thus have power over all its users. (If this were a natural right, then no matter how much harm it does to the public, we could not object.) Interestingly, the US Constitution and legal tradition reject this view; copyright is not a natural right, but an artificial government-imposed monopoly that limits the users' natural right to copy.
Another unstated assumption is that the only important thing about software is what jobs it allows you to do—that we computer users should not care what kind of society we are allowed to have.
A third assumption is that we would have no usable software (or would never have a program to do this or that particular job) if we did not offer a company power over the users of the program. This assumption may have seemed plausible, before the free software movement demonstrated that we can make plenty of useful software without putting chains on it.
If we decline to accept these assumptions, and judge these issues based on ordinary common-sense morality while placing the users first, we arrive at very different conclusions. Computer users should be free to modify programs to fit their needs, and free to share software, because helping other people is the basis of society." -- R.M. Stallman, About the Gnu Project: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
Software piracy exists with regard to proprietary software as well as smartphone apps. Using and modifying Linux code, be it Ada source, BASH scripts, C (and C++) source, etc. I am not sure about HTML and XML, but GPL could augment ordinary copyright laws to cover those mark-up languages as they usually present documents on the Internet or are used to manipulate character data (or manipulate characters as data in the case of XML, and also include ASCII encryption (in some hexadecimal format such as binhex, uuencode, or xxencode) of raw binary data.
Though, the publishing derivative of Gnu Public License (GPL) could cover the SGML-like languages. The GNU site should have that somewhere.
Returning to the quoute, the text refers to another article by Stallman called "Why Software Should Not Have Owners", which is almost like a prime directive for UNIX programmers and users.
In it, he writes:
"Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright. That's the reason for the increasingly nasty and draconian measures now used to enforce software copyright. Consider these four practices of the Software Publishers Association (SPA):
1) Massive propaganda saying it is wrong to disobey the owners to help your friend.
2) Solicitation for stool pigeons to inform on their coworkers and colleagues.
3) Raids (with police help) on offices and schools, in which people are told they must prove they are innocent of illegal copying.
4) Prosecution (by the US government, at the SPA's request) of people such as MIT's David LaMacchia, not for copying software (he is not accused of copying any), but merely for leaving copying facilities unguarded and failing to censor their use.
All four practices resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as “samizdat”. There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the US the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and the same harshness" -- R.M. Stallman, Why Software Should Not Have Owners: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
With regard to "free" software, it is an extension of free speech. If one pays a member of the SPA to attend workshops on their new product, they will probaby be given a non-disclosure document to sign, which essentially makes that product in effect a "slave" of its own. If one then "frees" the slave of an SPA owner, he becomes a "pirate". However, there is an unwritten clause in that owner's license which states that a customer may purchase "limited" freedom to use more than one copy on more than one computer. This is called "licensing". This licensing violates a person's right to make a copy of a software product because usually the contract limits one to a certain number of copies and a license has to be purchased to cover more copies. In short, software licensing only propagates slavery.
If the product has a defect in it, and you know of a workaround to compensate it, sharing the knowledge about that workaround isn't covered by software licensing; but if the workaround consists of changing a byte or character in the software, then that could be considered a license violation even if it improves productivity.
Consider a product whose license limits it to 10 copies, and the 11(+n) copy will not run on any computer, and the license for additional copies is expensive. Suppose a customer reverse engineers the software and figures out how to change the program so that the 11th copy will still run on his computer. He is considered to be a software pirate for freeing his program from being limited to 10 copies. If he tells other people about how to modify their copies of this program, then he is a criminal.
Today, digital rights are considered the sole domain of publishers, be they software (the members of SPA) or multimedia like MPAA or RIAA. Rather than sticking with offshore piracy, common in Asia because of the cost of software, which very few people in Asian countries can afford, publishers are now targeting children of people who work in offices whose owners usually pay publishers for limited licensing of their products. This is probably because it's harder to bring Asian pirates to justice, but you have a captive audience waiting to be milked of their money for being busted for peer-to-peer (p2p) download of multimedia and software products in the form of high school and college students.
Obviously, the conclusion I can come to is that being a good consumer comes with a high price. Any consumer is in no way free, for he has to live by the rumes of his community, and with respect to published works controlled by publishers, he always pays for the right of use, be it running a program on a computer or even reading a book.
A typical consumer may consist of being a Winblows "owner", where you own a license to use Vista. He is described in Stallman's first quote above. In contrast, a UNIX programmer/user is described in his second quote.
Returning to the title of this article, the reason why software wants to be free is, in the hands of a competent programmer or user, the source code has the potential of being modified to work on a particular system.
For example, on my Ubuntu Linux system (6.06.10 LTS), I've installed smokeping, a software which fpings hosts and sotres the results in a database that is used to create graphics of network statistics based on the response times derived from the use of smokeping.
And one bug I've noticed is that Ubuntu Linux creates /var/run as a volatile tmpfs - that is, the directory which stores pid files for programs run as daemons which may have child copies running concurrently in memory and need to know the process number for their parent in order to complete nicely and not run amok by becoming zombies.
My understanding of why /var/run was made volatile is that it is easier to dump it on reboot and start over. However, the smokeping author has a script run from /etc/init.d which has this line:
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/smokeping/$NAME.pid
** $NAME=smokeping
Basically, in this line the program to start and stop a program nicely as daemon, start-stop-daemon, starts quietly, and in the process creates the file smokeping.pid in the directory, /var/run/smokeping
However, this line fails on startup because /var/run being actually a directory mounted on a tmpfs, does not have the directory /var/run/smokeping !
Here's df's output showing /var/run:
varrun 127340 196 127144 1% /var/run
So, whenever I reboot my system, I get an error message that states that smokeping cannot create /var/run/smokeping/smokeping.pid because the smokeping directory does not exist.
Now /var/run/smokeping needs to be created first and assigned ownership to smokeping by root before /etc/init.d/smokeping can be run successfully.
So this needs to be done on startup before other resident programs are run under one of the seven different user modes Linux uses. This is done by running in numerical sequence the scripts in /etc/rcS.d, followed by the running of scripts found in the rc[0-6]. rc0.d and rc1.d are used for killing processes during certain shutdown modes, with rc0.d for major shutdown (halt) and rc1.d for single user mode.
However, for the purpose of this example, I'll assume we know where smokeping runs from after startup, and if I get a question about that, find out so we both know.
Because of the nonexistence of the /var/run/smokeping, I had to create a script to check to see if the smokeping.pid is in it, and if it isn't to confirm the directory smokeping is present and after confirming that it does not exist, then create the directory and change ownership to smokeping by root.
And this effort was done all because of a 'bug' in smokeping.
That's like about a total time of an hour invested because of one bug which partially due to the volatile nature of /var/run, but mostly due to the author of smokeping assuming that the installation of the smokeping software would create the smokeping directory on a /var/run directory that is a part of the /var hierarchy on the filesystem.
Now it would not be useful to use apt-get install --reinstall smokeping, since in some cases you may have to download smokeping again, just to recreate the /var/run/smokeping directory.
I could have edited the /etc/init.d/smokeping script but realized that restarts and stop/starts would rerun a check for the /var/run/smokeping repeatedly. So I created my own script, thus leaving the startup script /etc/init.d/smokeping alone.
Instead, I created /etc/init.d/mksmokeping_dir to create the directory and give the smokeping user ownership. Then I created a link to /etc/rcS.d/S98mksmokeping_dir so that the next to last thing started up is the creation of the smokeping directory.
I presented this example to show you how one software was freed of a bug caused by making /var/run volatile i.e. mounting it as a tmpfs. The action of this bug was to prevent the creation of a pid file used by the program to handle child process completion i.e. knowing the process ID number of their parent, they are able to complete nicely and not live on as zombies. My script basically checks to make sure the pid file and the /var/run/smokeping directory do not exist before creating the smokeping directory and assigning ownership to smokeping. Hopefully my program solves this problem and successfully fixes this bug on startup consistently.
And generally I hope I have explained why software wants to be free, and hinted at what kind of freedom applies to software (and other published works related to computers). This is the reason why I am here on Jinx. I figure I'd be collaborating with the enemy by using a third-party example and avoiding using a recent trivial example of how I freed a particular software on my Linux computer.
If someone is reading this post and is using Ubuntu Linux, then I may provide my mksmokeping_dir script on demand. If you wish to use smokeping, then you should remember that you need apache if you don't need to "break" your system to use it with thttpd. I don't mention how to break the system to use smokeping with thttpd because it is trivial: it consists of changing the smokeping config file to point to the rrd subdirectory. the main html directory is /var/www/smokeping in which are subdirectories created for the png files used to display graphic statistics.
If you need the config file to see how I do it under my system, then I can't let you have my version. Another thing that needs to be done, which does break Linux, is you have to modify the permissions of the smokeping directory and everything under it to 777 or at least chown smokeping the rrd files. So, don't try this on a DMZ'd computer because you can end up with /var/www/smokeping being turned into a ftp warez repository.
Thus, if you want to use smokeping on Ubuntu Linux under Apache, then you only need my script.
If you want to adapt smokeping to thttpd, then you have to break Linux security to do it by making /var/www/smokeping world read/writeable preferably owned by smokeping. The risk here is that once smokeping is owned by a cracker, root can be compromised with some work, especially if your password is secure by consisting of a minimum of seven alphabetic charactrs and one numeric character, and is changed every three weeks. So, remember, thttpd is for secure media pushing content and should not be pushing output of programs that need to break security by the use of world read/writeable permissions on everything. You might get away by using chmod -R 755 and chown -R smokeping:smokeping on /var/www/smokeping.
One assumption is that software companies have an unquestionable natural right to own software and thus have power over all its users. (If this were a natural right, then no matter how much harm it does to the public, we could not object.) Interestingly, the US Constitution and legal tradition reject this view; copyright is not a natural right, but an artificial government-imposed monopoly that limits the users' natural right to copy.
Another unstated assumption is that the only important thing about software is what jobs it allows you to do—that we computer users should not care what kind of society we are allowed to have.
A third assumption is that we would have no usable software (or would never have a program to do this or that particular job) if we did not offer a company power over the users of the program. This assumption may have seemed plausible, before the free software movement demonstrated that we can make plenty of useful software without putting chains on it.
If we decline to accept these assumptions, and judge these issues based on ordinary common-sense morality while placing the users first, we arrive at very different conclusions. Computer users should be free to modify programs to fit their needs, and free to share software, because helping other people is the basis of society." -- R.M. Stallman, About the Gnu Project: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
Software piracy exists with regard to proprietary software as well as smartphone apps. Using and modifying Linux code, be it Ada source, BASH scripts, C (and C++) source, etc. I am not sure about HTML and XML, but GPL could augment ordinary copyright laws to cover those mark-up languages as they usually present documents on the Internet or are used to manipulate character data (or manipulate characters as data in the case of XML, and also include ASCII encryption (in some hexadecimal format such as binhex, uuencode, or xxencode) of raw binary data.
Though, the publishing derivative of Gnu Public License (GPL) could cover the SGML-like languages. The GNU site should have that somewhere.
Returning to the quoute, the text refers to another article by Stallman called "Why Software Should Not Have Owners", which is almost like a prime directive for UNIX programmers and users.
In it, he writes:
"Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright. That's the reason for the increasingly nasty and draconian measures now used to enforce software copyright. Consider these four practices of the Software Publishers Association (SPA):
1) Massive propaganda saying it is wrong to disobey the owners to help your friend.
2) Solicitation for stool pigeons to inform on their coworkers and colleagues.
3) Raids (with police help) on offices and schools, in which people are told they must prove they are innocent of illegal copying.
4) Prosecution (by the US government, at the SPA's request) of people such as MIT's David LaMacchia, not for copying software (he is not accused of copying any), but merely for leaving copying facilities unguarded and failing to censor their use.
All four practices resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand as “samizdat”. There is of course a difference: the motive for information control in the Soviet Union was political; in the US the motive is profit. But it is the actions that affect us, not the motive. Any attempt to block the sharing of information, no matter why, leads to the same methods and the same harshness" -- R.M. Stallman, Why Software Should Not Have Owners: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
With regard to "free" software, it is an extension of free speech. If one pays a member of the SPA to attend workshops on their new product, they will probaby be given a non-disclosure document to sign, which essentially makes that product in effect a "slave" of its own. If one then "frees" the slave of an SPA owner, he becomes a "pirate". However, there is an unwritten clause in that owner's license which states that a customer may purchase "limited" freedom to use more than one copy on more than one computer. This is called "licensing". This licensing violates a person's right to make a copy of a software product because usually the contract limits one to a certain number of copies and a license has to be purchased to cover more copies. In short, software licensing only propagates slavery.
If the product has a defect in it, and you know of a workaround to compensate it, sharing the knowledge about that workaround isn't covered by software licensing; but if the workaround consists of changing a byte or character in the software, then that could be considered a license violation even if it improves productivity.
Consider a product whose license limits it to 10 copies, and the 11(+n) copy will not run on any computer, and the license for additional copies is expensive. Suppose a customer reverse engineers the software and figures out how to change the program so that the 11th copy will still run on his computer. He is considered to be a software pirate for freeing his program from being limited to 10 copies. If he tells other people about how to modify their copies of this program, then he is a criminal.
Today, digital rights are considered the sole domain of publishers, be they software (the members of SPA) or multimedia like MPAA or RIAA. Rather than sticking with offshore piracy, common in Asia because of the cost of software, which very few people in Asian countries can afford, publishers are now targeting children of people who work in offices whose owners usually pay publishers for limited licensing of their products. This is probably because it's harder to bring Asian pirates to justice, but you have a captive audience waiting to be milked of their money for being busted for peer-to-peer (p2p) download of multimedia and software products in the form of high school and college students.
Obviously, the conclusion I can come to is that being a good consumer comes with a high price. Any consumer is in no way free, for he has to live by the rumes of his community, and with respect to published works controlled by publishers, he always pays for the right of use, be it running a program on a computer or even reading a book.
A typical consumer may consist of being a Winblows "owner", where you own a license to use Vista. He is described in Stallman's first quote above. In contrast, a UNIX programmer/user is described in his second quote.
Returning to the title of this article, the reason why software wants to be free is, in the hands of a competent programmer or user, the source code has the potential of being modified to work on a particular system.
For example, on my Ubuntu Linux system (6.06.10 LTS), I've installed smokeping, a software which fpings hosts and sotres the results in a database that is used to create graphics of network statistics based on the response times derived from the use of smokeping.
And one bug I've noticed is that Ubuntu Linux creates /var/run as a volatile tmpfs - that is, the directory which stores pid files for programs run as daemons which may have child copies running concurrently in memory and need to know the process number for their parent in order to complete nicely and not run amok by becoming zombies.
My understanding of why /var/run was made volatile is that it is easier to dump it on reboot and start over. However, the smokeping author has a script run from /etc/init.d which has this line:
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/smokeping/$NAME.pid
** $NAME=smokeping
Basically, in this line the program to start and stop a program nicely as daemon, start-stop-daemon, starts quietly, and in the process creates the file smokeping.pid in the directory, /var/run/smokeping
However, this line fails on startup because /var/run being actually a directory mounted on a tmpfs, does not have the directory /var/run/smokeping !
Here's df's output showing /var/run:
varrun 127340 196 127144 1% /var/run
So, whenever I reboot my system, I get an error message that states that smokeping cannot create /var/run/smokeping/smokeping.pid because the smokeping directory does not exist.
Now /var/run/smokeping needs to be created first and assigned ownership to smokeping by root before /etc/init.d/smokeping can be run successfully.
So this needs to be done on startup before other resident programs are run under one of the seven different user modes Linux uses. This is done by running in numerical sequence the scripts in /etc/rcS.d, followed by the running of scripts found in the rc[0-6]. rc0.d and rc1.d are used for killing processes during certain shutdown modes, with rc0.d for major shutdown (halt) and rc1.d for single user mode.
However, for the purpose of this example, I'll assume we know where smokeping runs from after startup, and if I get a question about that, find out so we both know.
Because of the nonexistence of the /var/run/smokeping, I had to create a script to check to see if the smokeping.pid is in it, and if it isn't to confirm the directory smokeping is present and after confirming that it does not exist, then create the directory and change ownership to smokeping by root.
And this effort was done all because of a 'bug' in smokeping.
That's like about a total time of an hour invested because of one bug which partially due to the volatile nature of /var/run, but mostly due to the author of smokeping assuming that the installation of the smokeping software would create the smokeping directory on a /var/run directory that is a part of the /var hierarchy on the filesystem.
Now it would not be useful to use apt-get install --reinstall smokeping, since in some cases you may have to download smokeping again, just to recreate the /var/run/smokeping directory.
I could have edited the /etc/init.d/smokeping script but realized that restarts and stop/starts would rerun a check for the /var/run/smokeping repeatedly. So I created my own script, thus leaving the startup script /etc/init.d/smokeping alone.
Instead, I created /etc/init.d/mksmokeping_dir to create the directory and give the smokeping user ownership. Then I created a link to /etc/rcS.d/S98mksmokeping_dir so that the next to last thing started up is the creation of the smokeping directory.
I presented this example to show you how one software was freed of a bug caused by making /var/run volatile i.e. mounting it as a tmpfs. The action of this bug was to prevent the creation of a pid file used by the program to handle child process completion i.e. knowing the process ID number of their parent, they are able to complete nicely and not live on as zombies. My script basically checks to make sure the pid file and the /var/run/smokeping directory do not exist before creating the smokeping directory and assigning ownership to smokeping. Hopefully my program solves this problem and successfully fixes this bug on startup consistently.
And generally I hope I have explained why software wants to be free, and hinted at what kind of freedom applies to software (and other published works related to computers). This is the reason why I am here on Jinx. I figure I'd be collaborating with the enemy by using a third-party example and avoiding using a recent trivial example of how I freed a particular software on my Linux computer.
If someone is reading this post and is using Ubuntu Linux, then I may provide my mksmokeping_dir script on demand. If you wish to use smokeping, then you should remember that you need apache if you don't need to "break" your system to use it with thttpd. I don't mention how to break the system to use smokeping with thttpd because it is trivial: it consists of changing the smokeping config file to point to the rrd subdirectory. the main html directory is /var/www/smokeping in which are subdirectories created for the png files used to display graphic statistics.
If you need the config file to see how I do it under my system, then I can't let you have my version. Another thing that needs to be done, which does break Linux, is you have to modify the permissions of the smokeping directory and everything under it to 777 or at least chown smokeping the rrd files. So, don't try this on a DMZ'd computer because you can end up with /var/www/smokeping being turned into a ftp warez repository.
Thus, if you want to use smokeping on Ubuntu Linux under Apache, then you only need my script.
If you want to adapt smokeping to thttpd, then you have to break Linux security to do it by making /var/www/smokeping world read/writeable preferably owned by smokeping. The risk here is that once smokeping is owned by a cracker, root can be compromised with some work, especially if your password is secure by consisting of a minimum of seven alphabetic charactrs and one numeric character, and is changed every three weeks. So, remember, thttpd is for secure media pushing content and should not be pushing output of programs that need to break security by the use of world read/writeable permissions on everything. You might get away by using chmod -R 755 and chown -R smokeping:smokeping on /var/www/smokeping.
20080106
OpenGridForum: Child of DARPA
Open Forum: Open Standards
"The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors leading the global standardization effort for grid computing. The OGF community consists of thousands of individuals in industry and research, representing over 400 organizations in more than 50 countries. Together we work to accelerate adoption of grid computing worldwide because we believe grids will lead to new discoveries, new opportunities, and better business practices." — Overview, Who We Are
"The Open Grid Forum accelerates grid adoption to enable business value and scientific discovery by providing an open forum for grid innovation and developing open standards for grid software interoperability." — The OGF Mission, ibid.
It is a subset of Open Source Software.
OGF is strong in the domestic American military industrial complex and globally in the European analog of the military industrial complex, but Canadian participation is notably absent. In Canada we have super-fast network links connecting campuses across the country.
This is where Ottawa agreed to front money to improve networking infrastructure between campuses across the nation so that research scientists in universities can collaborate in real-time with each other.
As well, other providers help with building infrastructure.
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