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Is Open Source a Synonym for Free Software ?

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

The market for open source and free software is surging high with its appreciation in mainstream segment also. The free software products like Linux or others are moving from the walled boundaries of servers to desktops and laptops. Recently, launched Ultra low cost laptops were supported on Linux and that came as a major breakthrough for it to garner some spotlight from tech analysts.

But still the concept of free software and open source software is not clear with many of us. We are confused at the basic level and interchanging the terms for each other. We use the terms Free Source and Open Source interchangeably and get them confused with the concept that they are available for free.

To some extent the concept gels with what we consider “available for free” but not in complete sense. The word “free” is basically the misnomer. We confuse it with “free burgers” but it should be considered for “free speech”. No doubt that some softwares from both the communities are available for free of cost and are offered as free downloads but not all utilities.

The two communities working with the aim of offering freedom to developers are working in the same direction but are literally and fundamentally different in their approaches. Till 1998, they were more or less same but after that the two movements separated with a different prospective, a different philosophy, and different motives.

The commonality in both the approaches is the open availability of source code to developers but the aim backing this approach is different with both the communities.

 

Where Free Software Community lays stress on providing source code to developers with the aim that user is free to do what he wish with the software’s source code. It is more philosophical in nature.

 

However, Open Source believes in offering source code to users with the aim that collaborative efforts can bring more subtle results. It has motivation that users can freely provide their suggestions for the source code and can append it to the existing one if results provided are efficient enough.





Both the communities lay stress on redistribution of code with no restrictions but the principles and motivations are different.

Where one seeks the liberty provided to users; the other targets the development of more efficient software programs with collaborative approach. Against the philosophical methodology of Free Software Community, the Open Source Community is driven by more practical reasons.

To some years the movements were working as a common alliance and Open Source was used as a marketing term for free software to reduce the ambiguity; but to worst it added more problems. So finally the two movements parted and started their own way.

Where the software developed by open source are more or less fits to zero-cost category, nothing like that can be defined for free software. To define it better, nothing which is free of cost can be a tailored fit for both the communities but cannot be turned off even.

Open Source is opposite to original context of Free Software. Free Software aims the freedom of users but Open Source aims the collaborative approach. The former stresses that users can freely see, modify and redistribute the code but latter has the approach that users can see the code but cannot modify it to suit its needs. In OSS, the liberty availed is in accordance of specific licensing agreements allowing one to fiddle with the code.

Free Software values freedom offered to users but Open Source believes in team development of software. Where one can be attached to social movement, the other is a development methodology. Both are against the patents and proprietary software, but cannot go hand in hand due to disagreement on certain principles.



To ask you, is GNU/ Linux is a free software or open source software? Cannot answer surely; Linux is not an open source software but a product of free software community (as you are free to make modifications).

At crux, it can be said that both are different movements with differing principles but are fighting against the common objective “Proprietary Software”.

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Does Open Source Software Have Monopolistic Tendencies?

Friday, January 6th, 2012

The open source movement was formally launched in 1998 when Netscape licensed and released their code as open source under the name of Mozilla. Since then, open source software projects, where users are also in part, the creators of the software content through collaboration, have been gaining in momentum. Critics argue that open source software has by nature, monopolistic tendencies once they turn into successful businesses. This seems contradictory. How can projects that are community based be described as monopolistic?

Price might play a big role in influencing one’s final choice when looking for a product created by a company with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial companies. Often a budget will only take a buyer so far, no matter the specifications of their business needs. But when software is free, everybody rallies behind the business perceived as offering the best solution to meet their needs, leaving only crumbs for their weaker competitors. After all, in the world of open source where software applications are available at no cost, why not use the best of the crop?

JBoss illustrates this well, having become the undisputed dominant open source application server. JBoss does not necessarily offer a unique product, but there are no close substitutes available for the function its software fills. Over the years many other open source projects have tried to compete with JBoss and have ended up falling though the cracks. JOnAS and Apache Geronimo are all still around but lagging behind in the shadow of the giant that is JBoss.

The success of an open source product depends as much on its popularity as on its community. In fact, one cannot survive without the other. Should a project lose its market lead, volunteers will leave and seek the prestige of contributing to the project dominating the market at the time. After all, who wants to work for the loser? As the releases are more and more scattered and the forums less active, the project loses its momentum. Eventually, potential clients are not interested enough to buy its documentation, ask for custom development, enroll in classes, pay for support or consultation and soon, the project is no longer commercially viable. In this manner, the dominating project will organically erase competition and become a kind of monopoly.

For example, openbravo has taken the lead for ERT (Enterprise Resource Planning). Any small to medium sized business looking for open source CRM (Customer Relationship Management) will think about sugarcrm and larger ones will turn to Compiere. The market for open source ECM (Enterprise Content Manager) is dominated by Alfresco Enterprise. And although the masses might not be able to describe how an open source application compares to a closed source one, many households are using Firefox as their Internet Browser and any edgy programmer will be expected to have installed Linux on their home computer. These are all examples of commercially successful and dominant open source software businesses.

Lets look at the area of billing software for which there is a real market need, yet surprisingly there is not much to be found in the way of open source. One explanation for this scarcity could lay in the fact that billing is simply not very sexy. A group of volunteers will likely be more enthused at the prospect of creating an application server software than that of developing a billing software. Also, billing requires great flexibility. Billing is intimately tied to the business rules of a firm and needs to accommodate them. Potentially, there exists as many business rules as there are services offered by different firms. A corporation offering web hosting will have business rules that differ from one offering newspaper subscriptions, although both need to use billing software to invoice their clients periodically.

One open source project can be spotted rising to the challenge. jbilling is an enterprise billing system written for the Java EE platform. It exhibits early signs of dominance in the market as it is the only billing system listed in the Optaros catalog. Optaros is a consulting and systems integration firm specializing in open source products. Also, statistics in SourceForge.net, an open source software development web site hosting more than 100,000 projects, classifies jbilling as the most active and popular billing project. jbilling exhibits all the signs of a healthy open source project on the rise. With a consistent increase in downloads, active forums, frequent releases, keen volunteers, etc. jbilling illustrates how a community can push a product to the top to cater to the market’s needs. More reasons for its growth can be found in the actual quality of the product it offers. It is flexible yet robust and can be customized to address an array of business rules, crossing over to many different industries, providing billing software services to companies big and small.

Interestingly, requests for an open source billing system built for telecommunication companies appear on a regular basis in its forums. In fact, telcos have been crying for years for such a product and it is only natural that eventually the call be answered. Should jbilling continue on its path to success, it can be foreseen that it will, soon enough, extend their software to satisfy this growing demand. And when this happens, it will solidly have established itself at the top, becoming the standard in the open source billing software industry.

As previously noted, monopolies generally have a bad reputation and for just cause. In the area of software, a monopoly leads to everybody being forced to use Microsoft as an example, with its expensive products well known for their lack of innovation and also, their bugs. The Brazilian government illustrated well the benefits of using open source software when, in 2005, it elected to abandon Microsoft in favor of the Linux operating system, citing economics as the number one reason. As Jose Luiz de Cerqueira Cesar, head of IT at Banco do Brasil reported to the BBC during an interview: “If computer users within a geographical region pool their expertise, they can develop software that is perfectly suited to their needs.” So when a monopoly forms in such an organic way, out of the contributions of dedicated volunteers and users, constantly being adjusted to satisfy the exact needs expressed by an ever changing market, when the software itself is available for anybody to use and modify for free and the ultimate result is a software that is well built, well tested and basically bug free, who’s to complain?

The Best Open Source Scripts on Php/mysql

Monday, December 26th, 2011

Here are the best open source scripts that are top rated by users.They are categorized into different category as CMS(Content management system) or called as portals,Blogs,ecommerce,groupware,forums,elearning,image galleries,wiki and many more.

We have produced the 3 top ranked listing in each category.You can see more in http://www.solidscripts.com or http://www.opensourcecms.com/.

Content Management System (CMS)

Drupal

Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites. Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL, and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.

Url – http://www.drupal.org/

Joomla

Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.

url – http://www.joomla.org/

Typo3

TYPO3 has to be one of the best CMS programs I have ever worked with. While reading reviews on it I came across the people who didn’t like it. Yes, TYPO3 might take some reading, its not your standard program, also NO TYPO3 IS NOT FOR BEGINNERS. You should know about programming before attempting this software, there is a release for beginners, but it’s not the best. I really reccommend this for advanced users!

Url – http://www.typo3.org/

Blogs

WordPress

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

Url – http://www.wordpress.org/

Textpattern

A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs.

Built into Textpattern is Textile, a simple syntax for nudging plain text into structurally sound and stylistically rich web content. Ordinarily fussy text amendments such as headers, hyperlinks, image tags and tables are created with one or two simple markers. Compared to navigating the tag soup of markup, writing and revising with Textile is much more intuitive, being closer to working with ordinary text. Once you’re ready to publish, copy marked up with Textile is automatically converted to valid XHTML, and because Textpattern stores both versions of each article, revising and updating is a snap. When composing or readying articles for publication in Textpattern, you can switch between three views of the article:plain text, XHTML (the code with which a web browser renders the article), and a rendered preview.

Sites published with Textpattern can employ unlimited registered contributors, each of whom may be assigned privileges by the publisher of the site. Five levels of privileges (publisher, managing editor, copy editor, writer and designer) are provided, and each reflects different access to article creation, approval, editing and deletion, and to image uploads, page design and CSS, and of course adding more contributors.

Installing and managing plugins that extend Textpattern’s abilities is straightforward. Once installed, plugins can be turned on and off from within the Textpattern interface, where detailed help and access to parameters used by plugins is also available.

Url – http://www.textpattern.com/

b2evolution

b2evolution is probably the most comprehensive blog engine you can find! It includes almost any feature you could expect from a blog tool, and more. Plus, it’s free, it’s open-source (GPL), it runs virtually anywhere (PHP/mySQL) and it’s available in many languages!

Url – http://www.b2evolution.net/

E-Commerce

osCommerce

osCommerce is the leading Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved.

The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve by attracting a community that supports the ongoing development of the project at its core level and extensively through contributions to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set.

Everything you need to get started in selling physical and digital goods over the internet, from the Catalog frontend that is presented to your customers, to the Administration Tool backend that completely handles your products, customers, orders, and online store data.

Url – http://www.oscommerce.com/

Zen Cart

Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently. Some solutions seem to be complicated programming exercises instead of responding to users’ needs, Zen Cart puts the merchant’s and shopper’s requirements first. Similarly, other programs are nearly impossible to install and use without an IT degree, Zen Cart can be installed and set-up by anyone with the most basic computer skills. Others are so expensive … not Zen Cart it’s FREE!

Zen Cart will deliver the ultimate online shopping experience to your customers. Navigating through your merchandise offerings is a breeze with Zen Cart, the program provides several “Spotlight” lists in addition to the traditional category to product links. Once a product is added to the shopping cart, secure checkout is a simple 3-step process. After providing the billing information, your customer chooses the shipping method. (multiple shipping methods including real-time internet shipping quotes are built-in) Next, a payment type is chosen from one of the popular payment modules. (PayPal and AuthorizeNet are just 2 of the included modules) Last, the customer reviews the order, shipping and payment choices, and confirms the order. You are immediately notified of the order and your customer automatically receives an e-mail confirmation.

Zen Cart gives web designers a robust and customizable electronic storefront that’s easy to keep up-to-date with new features. It provides usable, intuitive and unobtrusive purchase flows right out of the box based on proven industry best-practices – there are no major revisions required to get things right for your clients!

One of the secrets behind its power lies in our robust template system that “abstracts” the look-and-feel from the code and logic behind Zen Cart. This enables you to give clients a truly custom solution that integrates quickly and perfectly with their existing marketing websites.

Url – http://www.zen-cart.com/

phpShop

phpShop is a shopping cart application. The goal of the phpShop development team is to provide a stable web application platform that allows for additional development.

phpShop has been used by hundreds of web sites for selling online.

Url – http://www.phpshop.org/

Forums

PhpBB

phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.

Url – http://www.phpbb.com/

PunBB

PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages.

Url – http://www.punbb.org/

SMF

Elegant. Effective. Powerful. Free. SMF is all of the above. SMF is a next-generation community software package and is jam-packed with features, while at the same time having a minimal impact on resources. And, yes, it is free.

Url – http://www.simplemachines.org/

Image Galleries

Coppermine

Coppermine Photo Gallery is a picture gallery script. Users can upload pictures with a web browser or Windows XP Web Publishing Wizard (thumbnails are created on the fly), add comments, send e-cards, rate pictures and have their own gallery. The admin can manage albums/pictures/comments and batch add pictures that have been uploaded by FTP. The script has a theme system and is available in the following languages : Bosnian, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (standard and Brazilian), Russian and Spanish. The script use PHP, a MySQL database and the GD library (version 1.x or 2.x) or ImageMagick to make the thumbnails. An install script makes the installation very fast and easy.

Url – http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/

Gallery

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!

Url – http://gallery.menalto.com/

Plogger

Plogger is the next generation in open-source photo gallery systems. A web application not bloated with superfluous features or complicated configuration settings. Plogger is a simple yet powerful tool — everything you need to share your images with the world. Plogger is your photos integrated into your website, a fully featured photo sharing package with an attractive and easy to use administrative interface that makes managing your galleries a breeze. Integrating our gallery software into your website is as easy as inserting three lines of PHP code.

Url – http://plogger.org/

Open Source Unified Communications Software and Free Internet Calling Software

Sunday, December 25th, 2011

d business world has taken a new step forward with the advent of open source software. The use of open source software has gained a lot of popularity among managers and business owners, in spite of the fact that certain products may not always be most appropriate for their type of business. This newfound attraction comes with the major advantage that it is not developed or advertised by any of the big companies and corporations. Self-motivated and experienced IT professionals from all over the world are usually behind open source software.

Any program that is delivered under open source license gives its user complete control over the source code, which is one of the most important advantages of open source software. Access to the source code of a piece of software equals increased adaptability and flexibility, cost-effectiveness, long term usage, control and the possibility to upgrade without any additional costs. Open source software can be edited and modified in any way, so as to meet your specific needs and demands, and once you have modified it, you are also allowed to sell it.

Unified communication solutions are nowadays being considered by enterprises of all sizes as well as individual users. Companies and corporations welcome unified communication solutions and acknowledge their major benefit, namely that of improving their internal operations. Communication solutions are undergoing a process of rapid evolution and convergence. Integrating communication is not an easy task. However, with the help of open source unified communication software, applications such as telephony, instant messaging, email, conferencing, web, video and file sharing become scalable and easy to integrate within the enterprise. Unified communication software integrates applications that used to be disparate and makes them completely functional.

Open source unified communications software comes with a series of benefits for its users in what efficiency and profitability are concerned. In addition to that, open source unified communications software places users in control and abolishes all the restrictions that vendors of unified communications software typically impose. Open source unified communications software is available online from experienced IT professionals.

In quite a similar way, yet applicable to both individual users and companies, Internet calling software is in very high demand given the fact that traditional long distance calling has become a lot more expensive than Internet telephony. And with Internet calling demand on the rise, there are more and more companies and individual IT professionals who have entered this field in order to benefit from this growing market segment. Yet, as with any other products, some of the Internet calling software available on the market is not affordable to low budget users. Therefore, their best option is to look for and use free Internet calling software.

Free Internet calling software is available form a variety of sources, which can sometimes lead to confusion. It is therefore advisable that you read testimonials and customer reviews prior to downloading such software.

Open Source Proxy Server – Picking the Best Open Source Proxy

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

Setting up an open source proxy server isn’t the only solution to setting up a proxy but it is definitely the best.  The problem is, however, that there are many different kinds of open source proxy software providers on the net.  Are you aware of the differences between them and what you should be looking for in features if you want to setup your own proxy?

The first and perhaps the most important thing that any proxy server software must be able to do is provide anonymity.  People using a proxy want to do so to remain anonymous online.  Some proxy servers are not anonymous and are instead transparent.  While you can use these proxies to surf the internet, anyone who examines your connection to their website can see your IP and not the IP of the proxy you are using.  Make sure that your open source software provides 100% anonymity.

The second most important feature for any open source software is that of the ability to cloak.  Some proxy servers may provide anonymity to anyone using it, but they can not cloak themselves.  This means that your connection from a proxy server can be detected as one coming from a proxy.  True proxies never reveal themselves as a proxy and instead are able to cloak themselves.  The best proxy software is able to offer this cloaking feature.

Make sure you setup an open source proxy server that is truly anonymous and is able to cloak or hide its identity as a proxy server.  Such features like this are found only in the best proxies, such as elite proxies.