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History of opensource software:
Although all the stories related to software are obviously short, that of open source software is one of the
longest amongst them. In fact, it could be said that in the beginning, there was only free (libre) software.
Later on, proprietary software was born, and it quickly dominated the software landscape.When IBM and
others sold the first large-scale commercial computers, in the 1960s, they came with some software which
was free (libre), in the sense that it could be freely shared among users, it came with source code, and it
could be improved and modified. In the late 1960s, the situation changed after the ``unbundling'' of IBM
software, and in mid-1970s it was usual to find proprietary software, in the sense that users were not
allowed to redistribute it, that source code was not available, and that users could not modify the
programs.

In late 1970s and early 1980s, two different groups were establishing the roots of the current open source
software movement:

 On the US East coast, Richard Stallman, formerly a programmer at the MIT AI Lab, resigned,
and launched the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. The ultimate goal of the GNU
Project was to build a free operating system, and Richard started by coding some programming
tools (a compiler, an editor, etc.). As a legal tool, the GNU General Public License (GPL) was
designed not only to ensure that the software produced by GNU will remain free, but to promote
the production of more and more free software. On the philosophical side, Richard Stallman also
wrote the GNU Manifesto,
stating that availability of source code and freedom to redistribute and modify software are
fundamental rights.

 On the US West coast, the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) of the University of
California at Berkeley was improving the Unix system, and building lots of applications which
quickly become ``BSD Unix''Other remarkable open source project of that time is TeX (a
typesetting system, by Donald Knuth), which formed around it a strong community which still
exists today.

 In California, Bill Jolitz was implementing the missing portions to complete the Net/2
distribution, until it was ready to run on i386-class machines. Net/2 was the result of the effort of
the CSRG to make an unencumbered version of BSD Unix (free of AT&T copyrighted code).
Bill called his work 386BSD, and it quickly became appreciated within the BSD and Unix
communities. It included not only a kernel, but also many utilities, making a complete operating
system.

The work was covered by the BSD licence, which also made it a completely free software
platform. It also included free software under other licenses (like for instance the GNU compiler).

 In Finland, Linus Torvalds, a student of computer science, unhappy with Tanenbaum's Minix,
was implementing the first versions of the Linux kernel. In 1993, both GNU/Linux and 386BSD
were reasonably stable platforms.During the 1990s, many open source projects have produced a
good quantity of useful (and usually high-quality) software. Some of them (chosen with no
special reason in mind) are Apache (widely used as a WWW server), Perl (an interpreted
 language with lots of libraries), XFree86 (the most widely used X11 implementation for PC-
based machines), GNOME and KDE (both providing a consistent set of libraries and applications
to present the casual user with an easy to use and friendly desktop environment), Mozilla (the free
software project funded by Netscape to build a WWW browser), etc. Of all these projects,
GNOME and KDE are especially important, because they address usability by non-technical
people.
 The late 1990s are very exciting times with respect to open source software. Open source systems
based on GNU/Linux or *BSD are gaining public acceptance, and have become a real alternative
to proprietary systems, competing head to head with the market leaders (like Windows NT in
servers). In many niches, the best choice is already open source (an outstanding case is Apache as
Web server, with a market share consistently over 50%).

The announce of the liberation of Netscape Communicator, in 1998, was the starting
point of a rush of many big companies to understand open source software. Apple, Corel and IBM, for
instance, are trying different approaches to use, promotion or development of open source software.

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE:

Computer software that is distributed under a licensing arrangement and which allows the
computer code to be shared, viewed and modified by other users and organizations.

Uses of oss: Consideration for the OSS option in developing regions

will occur in the context of the broader ICT priorities.
Assuming that there is appropriate access to ICT
resources, OSS solutions can be applied in addressing
individual needs, along with pursuits in the public and
private sector.
Web sites based on OSS can be used for needs such
as e-government portals, educational information
sharing or advertising a small business’ products and
services. E-mail services can be established to provide
communication with regional or global contacts. Efforts
are also being pursued to localize a variety of OSS
solutions to support microbanking and other business
software needs.

The emphasis on “openness” in open source software has fostered the growth of a world-wide community
of
developers contributing to the evolution and improvement of various software programs for use in
networked
servers and desktop systems ranging from operating systems and web servers, to e-mail, word
processing and
spreadsheets.

Closed source software:

Closed source software (i.e. Microsoft Windows and Office) is developed by a single
person or company. Only the final product that is run on your computer is made
available, while the all important source code or recipe for making the software is
kept a secret. This software is normally copyright or patented and is legally
protected as intellectual property. The owner of the software distributes the
software directly or via vendors to you the end user. You cannot legally give it
away, copy it or modify it in any way unless you have a special licence or
permission to do so.

Closed Source software is created to satisfy a need in the market. In paying for the
software you get some definite perks. You can expect documentation to be provided
with whatever your purchase and you can expect the application to perform in the
way it was advertised. If the software does not work, you have the option of legal
action or some other recourse against the company who sold you the software. As
it is in the best interests of the company making the software, you can normally
count on being able to obtain help / support for the software that you have paid
money for.

On the down side software companies are under great amount of stress to
continually upgrade what they are selling. In most cases software is rushed out the
door before it is ready. This means that the software may not function correctly in
some cases and in the worst case, can compromise the security of your computer.
Most companies deal with this by producing patches that fix problems that get
discovered, however users have a poor record of applying these patches resulting in
thousands of computers around the world being left vulnerable every time a flaw is
discovered.

As mentioned above, closed source software companies are the sole people who are
allowed to build the products that they sell, so in the world there are relatively few
versions of popular software that people use, considering the millions of computers
being used today. For example, a security flaw affecting the latest version of
windows and in turn millions of computers was discovered in June last year. Most
users failed to apply the patch that was issued and within a few weeks a virus was
written to exploit this vulnerability. The result was many networks around the world
being brought to a crawl, clogged by the traffic produced by this program spreading
freely.