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The open source development model is not exactly new. Individual engineers have been using open source as a collaborative development methodology for decades. Now that it has come to the attention of upper and middle management, however, it's finally being openly acknowledged as a commercial engineering force-multiplier and important option for avoiding significant software development costs.
To put it another way, what object-oriented programming often promises in terms of encouraging "code re-use," open source software is definitely delivering. This does not come without certain costs and potential pitfalls, of course. This article describes the open source adoption process at a typical commercial software operation and discusses some of the more important checklist items that any evaluation of open source as an engineering option should include.
Roughly speaking, this checklist consists of the following: investigation, evaluation, adoption, and communication.
There is a lot of open source software in the world, and it is increasing day by day, so the first step in determining whether it can help your project is to make a careful study of what is already available. You don't want to reinvent some expensive wheels.
References to how Apple Computer has used various bits of open source have been included in the following examples to show how one or more pieces of software have found "institutional relevance." Examples of corporate usage of open source software abound, however, and an important part of the investigative process for any open source software product involves seeing who else is using it and why. Such examples can serve as a valuable roadmap for your own efforts.
Some well-known sources of open source software:
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
In the late 1970s, the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, began its seminal research into operating systems and the then-considerable task of extending the rather youthful Unix operating system into something more generally useful. The result of this work was the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, release of Unix, well known for its strong networking capabilities.
Not confined to operating systems, the BSD world also contains a wide selection of libraries, tools, and generally useful code that is distributed under the very liberal BSD license. This license essentially allows code to be used for almost any purpose, closed or open source, and without "encumbering" licensing effects for third-party code that uses it. The original BSD distributions spawned a number of independent projects such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, all of which continue to do innovative work that is released under the same BSD license. This has made BSD software a popular choice for commercial software and hardware vendors, who are thus free to create closed source variants of their products without undue restrictions. Such products include Apple's Mac OS X operating system, whose commands, libraries, and portions of the kernel are heavily based on FreeBSD. A number of commercial network appliances (routers, firewalls, servers) and hardware devices also use the highly cross-platform BSD operating system in an embedded operating system role.
The Apache Software Foundation
Probably best known for its acclaimed Apache Web server, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has since broadened its mandate to cover Java development tools—particularly where Web-based application (servlet) development is concerned—and Java-based build tools. ASF products are widely considered to be best-of-breed and have essentially taken over the Web server market with a market share far exceeding that of anyone else. Apple includes both Apache and Apache2 with Mac OS X.
Software produced by the ASF is released under the Apache license, a spiritual cousin to the BSD license, which allows both closed and open source usage with very few restrictions. See the evaluation section later in this article for more detail.
The GNU Project
The Free Software Foundation launched the GNU project in 1984 with the initial aim of creating a complete operating system environment (the GNU system). It may not have succeeded in creating a mainstream operating system, but it did create some excellent tools along the way. Among these are the Emacs editor, the GCC (GNU C Compiler), and the GDB (GNU Debugger). The latter two have essentially become de-facto standards in their own right. The GNU project has also created a number of general-purpose libraries and tools for easing the process of creating cross-platform software. The libraries and tools can substantially reduce the amount of work involved in many kinds of software development. Apple ships a fair amount of GNU software with its Mac OS X operating system, including but not limited to GCC, GDB, make, Emacs, and bash.
The greatest caveat to using software from the GNU project is probably its licensing terms. GNU software is released predominately under the GPL (GNU General Public License), with some of its software released under the less-restrictive but still formidable LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License). Anyone interested in incorporating GPL- or LGPL-licensed software in their own products should certainly read the section on evaluating licenses in this article.
The GNOME Project
Started in the mid-1990s as a project to bring an advanced desktop environment to the Linux operating system, GNOME (GNU Object Model Environment) has since evolved into a serious source of numerous general-purpose tools and libraries for doing everything from parsing XML to processing audio data. The GNOME project tends to take a very high-level approach to problem solving in general, and this shows in the software it offers. Apple includes GNOME software such as libxml2, an XML parsing library, with Mac OS X.
Most, if not all, of the GNOME project's offerings are licensed under the GPL or LGPL, so the same caveats apply.
The KDE Project
Another project started in the mid-1990s with the objective of bringing a sophisticated desktop environment to the Linux OS, the KDE Desktop Environment has also created a wide array of general-purpose tools and libraries in the process. These include a Web browser and office productivity suite, as well as libraries for image processing and parsing HTML. Apple includes the latter library, known as KHTML, in its Safari Web browser.
Most, if not all, of the KDE project's offerings are licensed under the GPL or LGPL, so the same caveats apply.
SourceForge
Billing itself as "the world's largest open source development site," with more than 74,000 hosted projects at the time of this writing, SourceForge is probably not practicing mere hyperbole. If you can imagine it, you can probably find it on SourceForge. Access to each project's information and other resources is made relatively easy. If there are any caveats to using SourceForge, it's simply the sheer magnitude of the material offered to search. It's probably also fair to say that of those 74,000-plus projects, a good number are either moribund or have not made much progress beyond coming up with a nifty project name and creating a SourceForge project. Still, free is free, and SourceForge is definitely worth a stop on any research expedition.
SourceForge projects are released under a variety of licenses, so each should be researched individually as part of your evaluation.
Google and Slashdot
Though somewhat more scattershot than the other options, simple keyword searches on search engines like Google are often very good ways of pulling out of the air references to what would often otherwise be highly obscure projects. You obviously need to have a fairly clear idea of what you're searching for, but search strings such as "qsort algorithm" or "3D library" can generate surprisingly relevant results in no time at all.
If you have a little more time on your hands and a willingness to wade through innumerable news articles on everything from the Mars landings to pending court cases on encryption, the Slashdot news site covers ongoing developments in the Apple, BSD, and Linux communities and can be a good source of information you might otherwise miss or not know to look for.
JORDAN HUBBARD is the manager of BSD technologies for Apple's core OS engineering team. He oversees the BSD technology base for Darwin, the Unix-based core of Mac OS X. Before joining Apple in 2001, Hubbard was a principal technologist for Wind River Systems, where he was responsible for the FreeBSD CD-ROM product line. He is a cofounder of the FreeBSD project, which began in 1992. Hubbard began his career in software in the 1970s, working on minicomputers, and has held various engineering and management positions in organizations, including U.C. Berkeley and Digital Equipment Corporation. He is a frequent contributor to the open source community and has been writing free software since 1982, beginning with Volume 1 of the comp.sources.unix archive and continuing with various works on MIT's X Contributed Software collection. |
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