Innovation communities Of Open Source

The principle of sharing predates the open source movement; for example, the free sharing of information has been institutionalized in the scientific enterprise since at least the 19th century. Open source principles have always been part of the scientific community. The sociologist Robert K. Merton described the four basic elements of the community - universalism (an international perspective), communism (sharing information), disinterestedness (removing one's personal views from the scientific inquiry) and organized skepticism (requirements of proof and review) that accurately describe the scientific community today. These principles are, in part, complemented by US law's focus on protecting expression and method but not the ideas themselves. There is also a tradition of publishing research results to the scientific community instead of keeping all such knowledge proprietary. One of the recent initiatives in scientific publishing has been open access - the idea that research should be published in such a way that it is free and available to the public. There are currently many open access journals where the information is available free online, however most journals do charge a fee (either to users or libraries for access). The Budapest Open Access Initiative is an international effort with the goal of making all research articles available free on the Internet. The National Institutes of Health has recently proposed a policy on "Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information." This policy would provide a free, searchable resource of NIH-funded results to the public and with other international repositories six months after its initial publication. The NIH's move is an important one because there is significant amount of public funding in scientific research. Many of the questions have yet to be answered - the balancing of profit vs. public access, and ensuring that desirable standards and incentives do not diminish with a shift to open access.

Farmavita.Net - Community of Pharmaceuticals Executives have recently proposed new business model of Open Source Pharmaceuticals [19]. The project is targeted to development and sharing of know-how for manufacture of essential and life saving medicines. It is mainly dedicated to the countries with less developed economies where local pharmaceutical research and development resources are insufficient for national needs. It will be limited to generic (off-patent) medicines with established use. By the definition, medicinal product have a “well-established use” if is used for at least 15 years, with recognized efficacy and an acceptable level of safety. In that event, the expensive clinical test and trial results could be replaced by appropriate scientific literature.

Benjamin Franklin was an early contributor eventually donating all his inventions including the Franklin stove, bifocals and the lightning rod to the public domain.

New NGO communities are starting to use the open source technology as a tool. One example is the Open Source Youth Network started in 2007 in Lisboa by ISCA members[20].

Open innovation is also a new emerging concept which advocate putting R&D in a common pool, the Eclipse platform is openly presenting itself as an Open innovation network

Ubuntu Linux 9.10 'Karmic Koala' Starts

Its Climb  Faster boot times, cloud services, more software and fewer "paper cuts" get packed into the latest Linux release.

      In February, Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu 9.10 would be codenamed the "Karmic Koala". Today, after months of development and buzz, the Karmic Koala is being officially released into the wild.
The open source OS's developers are simultaneously releasing the server, desktop and netbook editions of Ubuntu 9.10 today, offering what Shuttleworth earlier this week referred to as a complete platform that he hopes will become the default alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating systems.
The first thing that new users are likely to notice about the Karmic release is the speedier boot process.
"The boot process is now substantially faster in Karmic than it has been in any previous Ubuntu release," Shuttleworth said in a conference call with the media earlier this week. "We have a goal to get to a 10-second boot, and Karmic is a nice step in that direction."


The previous Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu Linux release had made similar boot speed gains when it debuted in April.
Among the new features of the Karmic releases is the Ubuntu Software Center, which is an attempt to revamp the add/remove software function in Ubuntu. Shuttleworth explained that Ubuntu is headed in the direction of opening up the software delivery mechanism both to empower third-party ISVs and to make it a smoother experience for users.
Shuttleworth is also hoping that the new Ubuntu release won't give users "paper cuts," either. As part of the release cycle for Karmic, Ubuntu started a project called 100 Paper Cuts, which aimed to eliminate bugs and trivial annoyances that users had identified. Shuttleworth reported that for the final release, there had been some 80 "paper cut" fixes.
With Karmic, Ubuntu is also opening up a new effort to deliver network services to the user's desktop with the Ubuntu One service. Ubuntu One provides users with 2 GB of free backup storage and cloud synchronization, housed on Amazon's S3 cloud storage service and paid for by Shuttleworth's company Canonical, which is Ubuntu's lead commercial sponsor.

Ubuntu One also offers an option to purchase 50 GB of cloud-based storage.
In Karmic, Ubuntu One is focused on file management as well as some contact and address book management. But in the future, Shuttleworth said that Ubuntu One will move into other areas, such identity management.
"We really are starting to combine the idea of free software with services direct to the desktop and shifting the emphasis from the personal computer to personal computing," Shuttleworth said. "This is blurring the lines between traditional desktop software and what people are referring to as computing in the cloud."
On the server side of Ubuntu, enabling the cloud is also a key goal, courtesy of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), another enhanced feature of the Karmic release. UEC made its initial Ubuntu debut in the Jaunty Jackalope release in April with full enterprise support services following several months later. In the Karmic release, UEC is being more tightly integrated into the server as well as being enabled with a UEC store for applications. The application store packages cloud-ready application for easy consumption and deployment by enterprise users -- similarly to models like Apple's App Store for the iPhone.
While Ubuntu has added features and performance improvement on its server OS, it still faces a strong competitive battle against Linux rivals Red Hat and Novell in the enterprise space. One area that Ubuntu has focused on with past releases is server certification for enterprise hardware, though that wasn't a key focus in the Karmic release.
"The general server story continues to improve, it is wonderful to see the rate of adoption of adoption of Ubuntu on the server generally," Shuttleworth said. "Our relationships on the hardware front are improving, but we have no new server certification announcements to make with this release."

source: http://www.internetnews.com

Media Of Open Source

Open source journalism — referred to the standard journalistic techniques of news gathering and fact checking, and reflected a similar term that was in use from 1992 in military intelligence circles, open source intelligence. It is now commonly used to describe forms of innovative publishing of online journalism, rather than the sourcing of news stories by a professional journalist. In the Dec 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine this is referred to as user created content and listed alongside more traditional open source projects such as OpenSolaris and Linux.

Weblogs, or blogs, are another significant platform for open source culture. Blogs consist of periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts, using a technology that makes webpages easily updatable with no understanding of design, code, or file transfer required. While corporations, political campaigns and other formal institutions have begun using these tools to distribute information, many blogs are used by individuals for personal expression, political organizing, and socializing. Some, such as LiveJournal or WordPress, utilize open source software that is open to the public and can be modified by users to fit their own tastes. Whether the code is open or not, this format represents a nimble tool for people to borrow and re-present culture; whereas traditional websites made the illegal reproduction of culture difficult to regulate, the mutability of blogs makes "open sourcing" even more uncontrollable since it allows a larger portion of the population to replicate material more quickly in the public sphere.

Messageboards are another platform for open source culture. Messageboards (also known as discussion boards or forums), are places online where people with similar interests can congregate and post messages for the community to read and respond to. Messageboards sometimes have moderators who enforce community standards of etiquette such as banning users who are spammers. Other common board features are private messages (where users can send messages to one another) as well as chat (a way to have a real time conversation online) and image uploading. Some messageboards use phpBB, which is a free open source package. Where blogs are more about individual expression and tend to revolve around their authors, messageboards are about creating a conversation amongst its users where information can be shared freely and quickly. Messageboards are a way to remove intermediaries from everyday life - for instance, instead of relying on commercials and other forms of advertising, one can ask other users for frank reviews of a product, movie or CD. By removing the cultural middlemen, messageboards help speed the flow of information and exchange of ideas.

OpenDocument is an open document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents (including memos, reports, and books), spreadsheets, charts, and presentations. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format such as OpenDocument avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business, raises their prices, changes their software, or changes their licensing terms to something less favorable.

Open source movie production is either an open call system in which a changing crew and cast collaborate in movie production, a system in which the end result is made available for re-use by others or in which exclusively open source products are used in the production. The 2006 movie Elephants Dream is said to be the "world's first open movie"[17], created entirely using open source technology.

An open source documentary film has a production process allowing the open contributions of archival material, footage, and other filmic elements, both in unedited and edited form. By doing so, on-line contributors become part of the process of creating the film, helping to influence the editorial and visual material to be used in the documentary, as well as its thematic development. The first open source documentary film to go into production "The American Revolution" [18]," which will examine the role that WBCN-FM in Boston played in the cultural, social and political changes locally and nationally from 1968 to 1974, is being produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the non-profit The Fund for Independent Media. Open Source Cinema is a website to create Basement Tapes, a feature documentary about copyright in the digital age, co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Open Source Filmmaking refers to a form of filmmaking that takes a method of idea formation from open source software, but in this case the 'source' for a film maker is raw unedited footage rather than programming code. It can also refer to a method of filmmaking where the process of creation is 'open' i.e. a disparate group of contributors, at different times contribute to the final piece.

Open-IPTV is IPTV that is not limited to one recording studio, production studio, or cast. Open-IPTV uses the Internet or other means to pool efforts and resources together to create an online community that all contributes to a show.

Market Of Open Source

Software is not the only field affected by open source; many fields of study and social and political views have been affected by the growth of the concept of open source. Advocates in one field will often support the expansion of open source in other fields, including Linus Torvalds who is quoted as saying, "the future is open source everything."

Eric Raymond and other founders of the open source movement have sometimes publicly tried to put the brakes on speculation about applications outside of software, arguing that strong arguments for software openness should not be weakened by overreaching into areas where the story is less compelling. The broader impacts of the open source movement, and the extent of its role in the development of new information sharing procedures, remains to be seen.

The open source movement has been the inspiration for increased transparency and liberty in other fields, including the release of biotechnology research by CAMBIA, Wikipedia, and other projects. The open-source concept has also been applied to media other than computer programs, e.g., by Creative Commons. It also constitutes an example of user innovation (see for example the book Democratizing Innovation). Often, open source is an expression where it simply means that a system is available to all who wish to work on it. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public

Most economists would agree that open source candidates have a public goods aspect to them. In general, this suggests that the original work involves a great deal of time, money, and effort. However, the cost of reproducing the work is very low so that additional users may be added at zero or near zero cost - this is referred to as the marginal cost of a product. At this point, it is necessary to consider a copyright. The idea of copyright for works of authorship is to protect the incentive of making these original works. Copyright restriction then creates access costs on consumers who value the original more than making an additional copy but value the original less than its price. Thus, they will pay an access cost of this difference. Access costs also pose problems for authors who wish to create something based on another work yet are not willing to pay the copyright holder for the rights to the copyrighted work. The second type of cost incurred with a copyright system is the cost of administration and enforcement of the copyright.

The idea of open source is then to eliminate the access costs of the consumer and the creator by reducing the restrictions of copyright. This will lead to creation of additional works, which build upon previous work and add to greater social benefit. Additionally, some proponents argue that open source also relieves society of the administration and enforcement costs of copyright. Organizations such as Creative Commons have websites where individuals can file for alternative "licenses", or levels of restriction, for their works. These self-made protections free the general society of the costs of policing copyright infringement. Thus, on several fronts, there is an efficiency argument to be made on behalf of open sourced goods.

Others argue that society loses through open sourced goods. Because there is a loss in monetary incentive to the creation of new goods, some argue that new products will not be created. This argument seems to apply particularly to the business model where extensive research and development is done, e.g. pharmaceuticals. However, others argue that visual art and other works of authorship should be free. These proponents of extensive open source ideals argue that there should be no monetary incentive for artists.

History Of Open Source

Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials—typically, their source code. Some consider it as a philosophy, and others consider it as a pragmatic methodology. Before open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; the term open source gained popularity with the rise of the Internet and its enabling of diverse production models, communication paths, and interactive communities.Subsequently, open source software became the most prominent face of open source practices.

The open source model can allow for the concurrent use of different agendas and approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial software companies.The principles and practices are commonly applied to the peer production development of the source that is made available for public collaboration. The result of this peer-based collaboration is usually released as open-source, open source methods are increasingly being applied in other fields of endeavor, such as biotechnology.
The concept of open source and free sharing of technological information has existed long before computers existed. There is open source pertaining to businesses and there is open source pertaining to computers, software, and technology. In the early years of automobile development, a group of capital monopolists owned the rights to a 2 cycle gasoline engine patent originally filed by George B. Selden. By controlling this patent, they were able to monopolize the industry and force car manufacturers to adhere to their demands, or risk a lawsuit. In 1911, independent automaker Henry Ford won a challenge to the Selden patent. The result was that the Selden patent became virtually worthless and a new association (which would eventually become the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association) was formed.The new association instituted a cross-licensing agreement among all US auto manufacturers: although each company would develop technology and file patents, these patents were shared openly and without the exchange of money between all the manufacturers. Up to the point where the US entered World War II, 92 Ford patents were being used freely by other manufacturers and were in turn making use of 515 patents from other companies, all without lawsuits or the exchange of any money.

Very similar to open standards, researchers with access to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) used a process called Request for Comments to develop telecommunication network protocols. Characterized by contemporary open source work, this 1960s' collaborative process led to the birth of the Internet in 1969. There are earlier instances of open source and free software such as IBM's source releases of its operating systems and other programs in the 1950s, 60s, and the SHARE user group that formed to facilitate the exchange of software. Open source on the internet began when the internet was just a message board and progressed to more advanced presentation and sharing forms like a website. There are now many websites, organizations, and businesses i.e. Lego Corporation, who promote open source sharing of everything from computer code to mechanics of improving a product, technique, or medical advancement.

The decision by some people in the free software movement to use the label “open source” came out of a strategy session held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator. The group of individuals at the session included Christine Peterson who suggested “open source”, Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Michael Tiemann and Eric S. Raymond. They used the opportunity before the release of Navigator's source code to free themselves of the ideological and confrontational connotations of the term free software. Netscape licensed and released its code as open source under the Netscape Public License and subsequently under the Mozilla Public License.

The term was given a big boost at an event organized in April 1998 by technology publisher Tim O'Reilly. Originally titled the “Freeware Summit” and later known as the “Open Source Summit”, the event brought together the leaders of many of the most important free and open source projects, including Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum, Michael Tiemann, Paul Vixie, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape, and Eric Raymond. At that meeting, the confusion caused by the name free software was brought up. Tiemann argued for “sourceware” as a new term, while Raymond argued for “open source.” The assembled developers took a vote, and the winner was announced at a press conference that evening. Five days later, Raymond made the first public call to the free software community to adopt the new term.The Open Source Initiative was formed shortly thereafter.