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Letter from the Editor-In-Chief: the Open Source Movement

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Letter from the Editor-In-Chief: the Open Source Movement The Journal of Effective Teaching an online journal devoted to teaching excellence Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: The Open Source Movement Russell L. Herman† The University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC 28401 We are pleased to end our second volume of The Journal of Effective Teaching with in- teresting articles which explore critical thinking, cooperative learning, the millennial gen- eration, using iPods, science literacy, preparing students for the marketplace, and concept mapping. We thank the contributors and reviewers for making this a successful endeavor and look forward to more contributions from our readers and invite reviewers to work with us to provide more examples of effective teaching at colleges and universities. The Journal of Effective Teaching publishes many articles on a variety of topics from pe- dagogical practice to uses of technology in the classroom. However, there have not been as many recent publications on the use of technology. As university technology budgets have increased substantially over the past decade, it is important for us to occasionally discuss the high cost of computer applications as these costs are often a hardship for stu- dents and faculty. As a result, more people are joining the open source movement and are seeking ways to circumvent cost, storage and ownership. In this letter we review of the history of the open source movement and the software currently available to students and faculty under the guise of Open Source‡. History of the Movement In the 1950’s several organizations developed much of the software that was used and distributed by computer companies with their hardware. As hardware was their main em- phasis, companies sought to keep the price of software low. Programmers at the time had grown up in an era of freely shared software, much the same as many share cooking recipes. In 1965 Applied Data Research (ADR) began to license its software at a time when IBM was giving their software away. However, by the late 60’s ADR filed an anti- trust suit against IBM, forcing IBM to unbundle most of its software. This action resulted in the commercialization of computer software and operating systems (Goetz, 1998). In 1969 Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and J.F. Ossanna at AT&T Bell Labs began de- velopment of an operating system for the PDP-7 to play a game, “Space Travel”, and which became the beginning of the Unix operating systems (Ritchie, 1980). However, when they were faced with the replacement of the PDP-7 by a newer machine, they real- ized that they needed an operating system which was not tied to the hardware. So, they † Author's email: [email protected] ‡ This is a shorter and more general take adapted from Herman & Lugo, 2008. The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, 1-4 ©2008 All rights reserved. Herman 2 developed a portable system with the idea that operating systems should not depend on the hardware and should be portable between different computers. So, they wrote a new operating system and mailed it to other users. This action lead to the birth of a commu- nity of Unix hackers§ and several distributions of the Unix operating system evolved at places like Berkeley and MIT. In 1984 Richard Stallman, who found himself passionately disagreeing with the new pro- prietary philosophy being adopted by universities, left MIT and began working on a free version of the Unix operating system, GNU, which is short for GNU in not Unix. By free, Stallman meant software that could be freely used, read, modified, and redistributed. He expressed the idea of free software, which did not mean freedom from cost, but free as in “free speech not free beer”. This view of how software should be distributed, lead Stallman to starting the GNU Project in 1983. According to Stallman (2007) The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular. So we needed to use distribution terms that would prevent GNU software from being turned into proprietary software. In 1985 interest in the GNU Project had lead to the creation of the Free Software Founda- tion (FSF). The FSF wrote and maintained a number of free software programs. How- ever, in the 1990's the FSF needed a free kernel, which managed the computer’s re- sources and allows applications to access the resources. In 1991 Linus Torvalds, a second year student at the University of Helsinki and a self-taught hacker, developed a free oper- ating system and posted the news on a user’s network to the hacker community. The new system spread quickly and Linux, as it became known, has grown into a well-known op- erating system competing with Microsoft Windows. In 1998 the notion of Open Source Software grew out of the free software movement. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was started by a group including Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens (Tiemann, 2006). Raymond stated in his 1999 book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which was based on a 1997 talk, that the source code should be available with each software release, and the code developed between releases should be restricted to an exclusive group of software developers. In the Bazaar model, he suggests that code is de- veloped over the Internet in public view, an idea credited to Torvalds. The central thesis is that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"; i.e., the more widely available the source code is for public testing and scrutiny, the more rapidly the bugs will be discov- ered. A recent realization of this is Wikipedia, which depends on a large community of users to contribute and spot errors in the Wikipedia entries. Partly in response to Raymond, in 1998 Netscape decided to release its source code in support of the Open Source Initiative. The Mosaic Netscape 0.9 browser first appeared on § Stallman (2007) describes hackers as follows The use of “hacker” to mean “security breaker” is a confusion on the part of the mass media. We hackers refuse to recognize that meaning, and continue using the word to mean, “Someone who loves to program and enjoys being clever about it.” The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, 1-4 ©2008 All rights reserved. The Open Source Movement 3 October 13, 1994. In 1995 Microsoft Internet Explorer was introduced in the Windows 95 Plus Pack. A competition between the two browser giants then raged for several years. As of 1998 Netscape Communicator 4.0 was provided for free under the Netscape Public License. However, later that year it was announced that Netscape was to be purchased by AOL and by November 2000 AOL released Netscape 6.0 (Moody, 2007). Things went downhill after that, leading to the end of Netscape in March 2008. In the meantime, other open source browsers have appeared and have done well, such as the Firefox browser. Open Source Applications In recent years the open source movement has grown and produced many alternatives to well known proprietary products. The software and its source has been located at sites such as sourceforge.net. A few prominent applications are displayed in Figure 1. Figure 1. Sample Icons of Common Open Source Applications In its early years, open source software had many drawbacks. It was buggy, difficult to install, incompatible with MS Windows, and took a computer hacker to get it running. However, the current generation of these programs has become more user-friendly and is getting the attention of a bigger audience. There are programs for about anything one would like to do, such as editing documents, audio files, or video files. Expensive pack- ages like MS Office has its counterpart, Open Office. Many expensive products, like mathematics and statistics packages, have their counterparts which now are reaching the level of usability and stability expected by a computer literate population. The Linux op- erating system has evolved into user-friendly distributions, such as Ubuntu, which have the look and feel of MS Windows and are used to do anything from office work to run- ning home media centers. More recently some open source applications have been reduced in size so that they fit on USB flash drives. For example, PortableApps.com (http://portableapps.com/) provides a portable suite of applications that you can carry and use on any computer (See Figure 2.) The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, 1-4 ©2008 All rights reserved. Herman 4 and uses as little as 100 MB or 350 MB, depending Figure 2. Some common Open on one’s needs. You can even find small operating Source applications have been systems, like Linux distributions, which fit on a redesigned to work off of USB USB stick, such as the systems offered by memory sticks. http://www.pendrivelinux.com/. The advantage to the user is that applications do not need to be found on specific computers. Lab machines need not be configured with every Imaginable applica- tion used across campus. Hard drives need not be cluttered. Open Source and Education The advantages of the new open source options to faculty are the costs to their departments and their students and the ease at which the software can be obtained within the confines of administrative practices. Portable applications may allow new ways to distribute applications and operating sys- tems and make technology more accessible to stu- dents from all socioeconomic backgrounds. The philosophy behind the open source movement is beginning to percolate into other arenas, like textbook publishing and research journals leading to easier dissemination at lower costs. As faculty, we should become knowledge- able of these trends and be ready for changes to how we develop and share our ideas.
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