IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2013 - 40

pen Source (OS)
[1], [2] refers to a
new software development
paradigm
where
volunteers
collaboratively create software.
The promise of OS is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to vendor
lock-in. At the Intellect 2012 conference in London [3], Liam Maxwell, Cabinet Office Director of
Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) futures, championed that OS is the future model
for delivering IT.
While many countries have
already embraced OS solutions
[2], the trend has remained primarily a phenomenon for developed economies. Case studies
conducted by the European project reveal that many countries and
regional municipalities in Europe
are using OS software. The Gartner study [2] reported that 85% of
enterprises in Asia Pacific, Europe,
and North America are using OS
software and projected that, by
2012, at least 80% of all commercial software solutions will include
substantive OS components. These
findings are consistent with studies carried out by Actuate [2] that
involved about 1000 businesses
in North America, the U.K., Germany and france. furthermore,
Microsoft [4], which has long been
viewed as the mortal enemy of OS,
is moving towards OS with the aim
of retaining its influence in the
software development community
and reaching young programmers
schooled in the new design methodology. for example, Microsoft
Azure [4] runs applications written
in Java, Ruby on Rails, and PHP,
and has already embraced OS platforms like Hadoop.
An ICT framework is proposed
with concrete policy measures for
individual users, companies, and
developers, that can help increase
the use of OS software in developing countries. This increase in the
use of OS leverages the benefits
40

inherent in such software to support economic development [5]
through local technology innovation. The proposal is supported by
results from a survey carried out
in Mauritius in 2011, a developing country, where valid responses
were gathered from 100 respondents including policy makers,
people from industry and academia, and students. The aim of the
survey was to assess the adoption
and penetration level of OS software in different sectors and how
they were perceived with respect to
proprietary software.

Open Source Software
What is Open Source Software?
OS software [6] is software whose
source code is published and accessible to everyone. Several licenses,
such as GNU General Public
License (GPL) [2] of the free Software foundation, give users the
freedom to download, use, distribute, or even tailor the software to
their needs. The changes can then
be shared with the OS community so that everyone can benefit
from it. This radical model [2] for
developing free and OS software
represents a significant shift in the
way traditional closed source or
commercial off-the-shelf software
is being developed, distributed,
maintained, and supported, and
has produced a number of successful applications. The Internet [6]
is viewed as the catalyst to the OS
boom by allowing collaboration
of geographically distributed individuals or volunteers using tools
like Concurrent Versioning System, forums, and mailing lists to
coordinate their software development efforts. OS software may not
always be completely free and differs from shareware and freeware.
Shareware refers to demonstration
software made available for free for
a specific evaluation period while
freeware refers to software that is
distributed freely without making
the source code public.

Today, OS software [7] is leading innovation in major technology
segments including mobile, cloud,
and business models. According
to Mike Evans, Vice-President of
Business Development at RedHat,
the "cloud" of almost all companies adopting cloud computing
[26], except Microsoft, has been
built on OS software. Although
powerful giants like Microsoft
and Oracle may have the resources
to do everything by themselves,
experts believe that the proprietary
locked-in universe they represent
will be crushed by the cloud wave.
Some examples of widely used
OS software are Linux, Mozilla
firefox, Google Chrome, Apache,
LibreOffice, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
PHP, Perl, Python, Java, Eclipse,
Postfix, Sendmail, Samba, CloudStack, Joomla, Drupal, Moodle,
ProgeCAD, PythonCAD, Android,
Octave, GMAT, and WorldWind,
to name but a few. Acceptance for
Linux [6] is growing and it was
included in industry track studies in
2011 as a server operating system.
Although Linux has been most successful as an operating system for
servers, it can prove equally useful
in the desktop market. Moreover,
the latest Ubuntu release has features and interface comparable to
Windows 7.
The 2011 Mauritius survey
shows that 33% of respondents use
Windows, 6% use Linux or some
other OS operating system, and 61%
use both proprietary and OS operating systems, as shown in fig. 1.
Factors Positively Influencing
the Adoption of Open Source
Software
There is increasing use of OS software by individuals and businesses
worldwide. While uptake was previously driven by the need for cost
savings [7]-[9], today demand for
OS is based primarily on quality,
reliability, ability to continuously
improve and innovate, security and
bug fixing, and an end to vendor
lock-in. Major factors influencing

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

fALL 2013

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