Software is considered "Open Source" when its source code is published and licensed in such a way that others can copy the code, modify it and add to it. This makes a marked contrast to "traditional" software development models where an organisation or company writes and tests code without publishing the source. You may be asking how Open Source software can be profitable. Well, individuals and companies involved in Open Source projects obviously develop in-depth knowledge of the code and can use this (often charging) to:
| Software class | Microsoft product | Open Source alternative |
|---|---|---|
| Operating systems | Windows is the ubiquitous OS found on around 90% of all personal computers and a great many servers. Windows 95 and 98 were notoriously unstable (they crashed frequently). They were based on the old OS "MS-DOS", but MS have made significant improvements by basing later versions of Windows, such as XP, on the NT operating system. NT confusingly stands for New Technology, and was developed as a competitor to Unix. | Linux is the best known and most widely used open source OS, but there are others such as FreeBSD. There are many different distributions of Linux, but the four most common are Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian and SUSE. Ubuntu is perhaps the most common on the desktop, Red Hat has the widest use in enterprise servers and Debian is best suited for power users such as academics. SUSE was bought by Novell, who attracted a great deal of criticism for a patent agreement with Microsoft. Linux is preferred over Windows by some companies and individuals for its stability, security, and its free source. |
| Web Servers | Internet Information Server is Microsoft's answer to Apache. However, it has not managed to displace Apache as the most popular web server. | Apache is a well-established open source project, and the Apache web server is valued for its stability, security, speed and its incredible range of customisations. |
| Hypertext Pre-processors | Active Server Pages allow a web designer to generate HTML, XHTML or XML pages in realtime. The problems with ASP that are commonly cited are its relatively low speed, security concerns, expensive proprietary COM add-ons, and the fact that it is written in Visual Basic. ASP has now been subsumed as part of Microsoft's ASP.NET framework. | PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Pre-processor. It is a fully-fledged language with string manipulation, object handling, HTTP interface, database handling and a host of other features. Many believe that PHP is faster than ASP for most tasks, and has a simple C-like syntax. |
| Office Software | MS Office is Microsoft's "office productivity suite", including a word processor (MS Word), spreadsheet (MS Excel), email and calendar client (MS Outlook) and presentation package (MS PowerPoint). It is frequently updated for costly upgrades and some upgrades can not use files made with previous versions. | Open Office is administered by Sun Microsystems, who use it as a base for their Star Office suite of commercial software. It has the majority of MS Office's features and can read and write all but the most demanding files in Microsoft's document formats (.doc, .xls etc.). Open Office uses XML for saving files and can save word processed documents as PDFs and export presentations directly as Flash animations. |
| Browsers |
Internet Explorer
has been bundled with Windows since Windows 95. It can read a great range
of the files commonly published on the world wide web, but has fallen behind other
browsers in the processing and display of
XML and use of
CSS. Its main drawbacks are total
integration with Windows (meaning you have to have Explorer even if you don't
use if for browsing) and its support of proprietary HTML elements, whilst not
supporting standard elements like <object>. With no small
thanks to its bundling with Windows, Explorer captured 95%
of browser usage in 2004.
|
Firefox is an open source browser from the Mozilla Foundation (tracing a heritage back to the guys who brought you Netscape). Firefox has made strong technical progress, and now supports XML, CSS and the DOM much better than Internet Explorer. In addition, Firefox has taken the lead over Explorer in usability: you can disable pop-up windows, view multiple pages in tabs rather than new windows, and read MathML. |
| Integrated Development Environments | Microsoft's main IDE is Visual Studio. Many developers feel that it is good for producing fast business programs (in Microsoft's own VB and C# languages) but is not so good for detailed ground-up software development. | Eclipse (mainly from IBM) and Netbeans (primarily backed by Sun Microsystems) are the largest open source development environments. Eclipse is especially popular, and used by most developers who write in the Java language. There are many other very good open source editors and IDEs, perhaps the best of which is the lightweight and hugely extensible jEdit. |
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