layout: article title: “Open Standards and Open Source Software — What you need to know”

date: 2003-04-01 author: Sebastian Rahtz permalink: index.html firstpub: 2003-04-01 reviewed: status: live —Open Standards and Open Source Software — What you need to knowSebastian RahtzInformation ManagerOUCSApril 2003

Summary

• What are Open Standards?
• What is Open Source?
• How do they relate to each other?
• What are the practical results?
• Open government
• What does OUCS do?
• Further reading more of a taster than either a complete description, or a proposal.

What are Open Standards?

Firstly, agreements on how data is stored in files, with the specification agreed by community consensus and not owned by any one piece of software.

• Mathematical Markup Language is an open standard: it is defined by the W3C
• RTF is not an open standard: Microsoft define it, and others work out out to decode it
• Docbook XML markup is an open standard: it is managed by a software-independent committee, and fully published
• Photoshop .psd is not an open standard: Adobe decide what the format is
• PDF is not really open: Adobe define it, publish the spec and encourages others to implement it, but reserve the right to change it.

What are Open Standards? (2)

Secondly, open standards are protocols by which programmes talk to each other:

• TCP/IP
• HTTP
• SMTP
• compression systems
• SOAP ie the sort of agreement without which our IT structure would collapse tomorrow.

Real standards are defined by the International Standards Organization, but most people agree that (eg) W3C Recommendations are good enough.

What is Open Source? What is free software?

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

Why should you care about free or Open Source software? Because it:

• has no secrets: the innards are available for anyone to inspect
• is not privately controlled: so likely to promote open rather than proprietary formats
• is typically maintained by communities rather than corporations: so bug fixes and enhancement are frequent and free
• is usually distributed free of charge. (Developers make their money from support, training, and specialist add-ons; not marketing)

The open source definition

This is the formal text from the Open Source Initiative:

1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

1. Source Code

   The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form.

2. Derived Works

   The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

Open Source definition (continued)

1. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code

   The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of “patch files” with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time.

2. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

   The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

3. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

   The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

Open Source definition (continued)

1. Distribution of License

   The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

2. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

   The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program’s being part of a particular software distribution.

3. The License Must Not Restrict Other Software

   The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software.

This license business

There are 40-50 open source software licenses with minute variations of detail. Some of the interesting points of difference:

• The Gnu General Public License is designed for software developers, and insists that any program built using the licensed component must itself use the license
• Some licenses (eg in the TeX world) insist that a changed program must have a different name
• There are licenses which forbid commercial use of the software—these are not open source!

*Academic Free License *Apache Software License *Apple Public Source License *Artistic license *Attribution Assurance Licenses *BSD license *Common Public License *Eiffel Forum License *Eiffel Forum License V2.0 *GNU General Public License (GPL) *GNU Library or “Lesser” General Public License (LGPL) *IBM Public License * Intel Open Source License *Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer *Jabber Open Source License *MIT license *MITRE Collaborative Virtual Workspace License (CVW License) *Motosoto License *Mozilla Public License 1.0 (MPL) *Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL) *Naumen Public License *Nethack General Public License *Nokia Open Source License * OCLC Research Public License 2.0 *Open Group Test Suite License *Open Software License *Python license (CNRI Python License) * Python Software Foundation License *Qt Public License (QPL) *RealNetworks Public Source License V1.0 *Reciprocal Public License *Ricoh Source Code Public License *Sleepycat License *Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) *Sun Public License *Sybase Open Watcom Public License 1.0 *University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License *Vovida Software License v. 1.0 *W3C License *wxWindows Library License *X.Net License *Zope Public License *zlib/libpng license

Personalities

• The father, high priest, best emissary, and bête noire, of free software is Richard Stallman

• The man who made it mainstream by creating Linux, the Gandhi of Finland, is Linus Torvalds

Other names to know

Jon Bosak

the Sun engineer who pushed the development of XML through the W3C and stimulated a whole generation of open standards

Eric Raymond

Publicist of the open source movement, articulated the Cathedral and the Bazaar debate about software development

IBM and Sun

Big companies who support open source and open standards cornerstones of their business plans

Apache

Started as a project to improve the original web server, now a conglomerate of leading-edge software developments in the web world

Different areas of open source deployment

• Operating systems (primarily Linux and the BSD family) in the IT infrastructure;
• Networking systems (DNS servers, web servers, email services, firewalls, etc);
• Information systems (portals, VLE, content management systems (CMS);
• The user desktop (e.g., office productivity, multimedia tools, email and web clients, statistical packages, databases);
• Application packages for subject-based communities
• Software development; from serious programming in C down to casual CGI scripting, via web site creation in PHP or XSLT.

Clearing up misunderstandings

• Free software uses the free from freedom, not the one from free beer. Open source software may or may not cost money
• The cost of ownership often bears little relation to the cost of acquiring a piece of software
• Public domain is something different. Open source software has a copyright holder and conditions of legal use
• Open source software does not mandate exclusivity. You can use open source programs under Windows
• We should not choose software solely on the basis of open source. Interoperability and open standards for data are equally important

Some success stories

• TeX: free typesetting for the last 25 years
• The GNU collection of software development tools (compilers, editors, utilities etc)
• Perl: the original, and most powerful, open source scripting language
• Apache: originally just a web server, but now a family of high-quality open source projects based around the web and XML
• Linux: the operating system which made an entirely open-source world possible
• The GIMP (image manipulation): a true end-user program with a modern interface
• Open Office: a complete parallel universe to Microsoft Office
• uPortal: competing with portal frameworks at the enterprise level

What is Linux, by the way?

To be exact, we are talking about GNU/Linux systems:

Linux

… is an operating system kernel: the component which sits between an applications program (such as a word processor) and the hardware

GNU

… is a ever-expanding suite of free software components, providing all the functions of a Unix operating system (but GNU’s Not Unix)

…and …

A vast number of application programs for such an environment

Open standards meets open source?

Which is better?

• Commercial software which uses an XML data format and can be accessed using web service protocolsor

• An open source program which uses its own binary data format, its own interface, and its own programming language Open data and open communication between different components of your IT system gives you interchangeability of components.

Reasons why open standards matter

• We do not get locked into one company’s software
• We can add new components to our system
• We can get at our data in the future
• They are increasingly mandated by government

Notable open standards

• HTTP: the protocol of the web
• XML: eXtensible Markup Language, and its many associated languages, from RDF to XSL
• Unicode: a single character encoding for vast majority of the world’s scripts and symbol sets

e-Government Interoperability Framework

e-GIF has four main parts:

• A list of underlying standards, essentially XML as data delivery format, and XSL as transformation language for presentation
• A set of W3C XML Schemas for public sector information
• A metadata standard, close to the internationally-used Dublin Core
• Procedures for keeping the framework up to date with managed change

e-GIF (continued)

Key decisions underlying this list include:

• adoption of XML, and Unicode, as the underlying data standards
• recognition of the web as the primary delivery format
• recognition that interoperability is best achieved by use of open standards

Usage at OUCS

We depend on open source and open standards for crucial services:

• Operating systems: Herald runs under Linux
• Networking: Apache web servers and numerous network systems (DNS, Exim, LDAP etc)
• Software development: the majority of applications developed at OUCS are in Perl
• Our internal helpdesk system is web-based, open-source, and written in Perl
• The open VLE system (Bodington) is our flagship project for 2003
• The e-Science GRID depends on open standards and software
• Our web sites are (mostly) authored in XML

An Oxford take on OS and OS

• Open standards are of enormous strategic importance to us
• Open source is already a vital technique for software development
• Open source is of great pragmatic interest to us in software deployment
• Generally speaking, open source software promotes open standards
• Are we burying our heads in the sand over interoperability, conversion, and archiving?

Outside help?

JISC are going to fund an Open Source Advisory Service for UK HE/FE: OUCS are bidding to run it. The service might supply:

• A web-based clearing-house for up to date information
• Conferences and workshops
• Focussed assistance for institutions and software projects considering open source
• Investigative reports More news in late May.

Further reading

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy (Free Software Foundation)http://www.opensource.org (Open Source)http://www.debian.org (Debian Linux)http://www.stallman.org (Richard Stallman)http://www.w3c.org (World Wide Web Consortium)http://http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/ (e-GIF)http://www.egovos.org (Center of Open Source & Government)http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cathbazpaper/ (Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar