The latest issue of ACM’s Computing Reviews contains a “hot topic” essay on open source software: Open Source: The Dark Horse of Software? Written by Phillip A. Laplante of Penn State, the essay provides a brief overview of the open source movement, mostly from a business perspective, and provides a very brief summaries of seven current research areas, including:
- Open-Source Adoption Decision-Making and Business Value Proposition
- Legal Issues (Licensing and Intellectual Property)
- Qualities of Open-Source Software
- Open-Source Community Characteristics
- Source Code Structure and Evolution
- Tools for Enabling OSS and Applications
- Philosophical and Ethical Issue
The article provides some useful links to papers, books, and other resources on FOSS. About the closest it comes to “humanitarian” applications is this:
Clones of many well-known desktop and enterprise applications are available in open source, and these have become important to small businesses, nonprofit entities, and even governments of small and poor nations.
I doubt Richard Stallman will be happy with the following characterization of the relationship between GNU and Linux:
In 1983, Richard Stallman created a Unix-like operating system called GNU (a recursive acronym for “GNU is Not Unix”) and released it under a license that provided certain rights for use and redistribution—an open-source license. Eight years later, a graduate student at the University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds, created another Unix-like operating system, Linux, which he also made available for free. Both Linux and GNU are still widely available, and their evolution spurred the creation of many other open-source software (OSS) programs.
Shouldn’t that be FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) or better yet F/LOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software?
