Open Source Versus Proprietary Software

Open source software is growing in popularity in both the commercial sphere and the number individual end-users are increasing. The open source development methodology has been heralded by some of its proponents, such as EricRaymond[34], as a superior way of producing software code. Whether open source software is indeed faster, better, and cheaper is a matter of controversy. To begin with, what is open source? Roughly, it means that the source code is made public, and that the modifications made by its users also is turned back to the community. The details vary with the license adopted for the software. Some of the key criteria included in the Open Source Definition[30] are (a) the royalty free redistribution of the program, (b) the release of the source code, and (c) the requirement that all modifications be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. Open source software should not be confused with shareware (which is freely distributed, but whose source code remains proprietary) and public domain software (which is not licensed and thus available to anyone without constraint).[25] The today common, proprietary software (or closed source) development methodology means that customers pay for a nonexclusive license which allows

to them to use the software, but not to view or modify the source code. In other words is the software not sold as it is commonly formulated, it is rather leased to the customers. Customers are restricted in their use, modification and copying using technical or legal means and often both. Technical means can be to only provide machine-readable binaries and withholding the human-readable source code. Legal means can involve software licensing, copyright, and patent law.[39] The open source development methodology, with Eric Raymond at the front, is about offering practical accessibility to software source code. There is also Free
Software Foundation’s with Richard Stallman at the front which as a somewhat different view on the matter. The Free Software Foundation also propagates the practical benefits of open source, but they wish to emphasize the ideological aspect of freedom. They in particular wish to emphasize liberty and prefer the term of free software instead of open source software to stress this. The Free Software Foundation view free software as a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study and modify software.[37] A software license is a contract between the software publisher and the user of the software. This is where the difference between open source, free, and proprietary software is defined. An example of an open source license is the BSD license. It more or less allows anyone to do anything with the source code, with the exception three paragraphs about copyright notice and promoting derived products.[27] Any software using this license can become proprietary and only the object code will be distributed without the source code. This is by many considered as maximum flexibility and freedom, but the Free Software Foundation wish to prevent this from happening. The Free Software Foundation wishes to always make sure that free software stay free. Any software in the public domain is also possible to make proprietary in the same way as the BSD license. To avoid free software of becoming proprietary, the Free Software Foundations have created their own software license. The Gnu’s Not UNIX’s General Public License, or more commonly known as GNU GPL or just GPL, is a strong copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and it requires that all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well. This license was originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project and it is used for example by the Linux kernel.[37]