In 1998, with the release of Netscape navigator code and the founding of the "Open Source Initiative" organization, the term "open source" became popular. One may wonder why the alienation from the "free software foundation". According to wikipedia, one of the reasoning behind using the term was that "the advantage of using the term open source is that the business world usually tries to keep free technologies from being installed.".
Linux operating system is a classic example of open source software. The linux kernel is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL). To give an idea of how much linux benefited from being open source, here is an extract from wikipedia. A 2001 study of Red Hat Linux 7.1 found that this distribution contained 30 million source lines of code.[120] Using the Constructive Cost Model, the study estimated that this distribution required about eight thousand man-years of development time. According to the study, if all this software had been developed by conventional proprietary means, it would have cost about $1.48 billion (2014 US dollars) to develop in the United States.
Given that the ideals of the two movements are not so different, the term "Free and Open-Source software" (FOSS) is a common classification of many modern open source software. Apache License is one such FOSS license. We will take a brief look at the impact of a software product "Hadoop" under this license and the impact it has made.
Apache Hadoop is an open source implementation of google's Map-Reduce paradigm. It makes use of commodity hardware to do distributes processing of data. A number of software projects have grown around hadoop. The "Big Data" buzzword in today's world hinges on the Hadoop's ecosystem of software. This huge impact was possible only through the large open source community backing for Hadoop.
References
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
- http://opensource.org/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Hadoop
