Open Source and Linux - An Overview
Open Source You may have already heard the term open source in relation to technology - but what does it mean? Everyone has heard of software such as Microsoft Office. To obtain and use such a program, users must pay a fee, and the program coding is not something that anyone other than those who developed Microsoft Office is privy to. The act of copying the program without the licence key and distribution it could result in legal trouble. Conversely, open source software is the opposite: the source code is available to anyone to use, modify or distribute it at no cost. We can trace open source software back to the early 1980s, when computer scientist Richard M. Stallman launched a project called GNU. At the time, the goal was to provide a replacement for the UNIX operating system, a system that was developed in the late 1960s. Furthering his cause of allowing computer users technological freedom, Stallman then went on to start the Free Software Foundation in 1985. Stallman’s missi...