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Open Source ( Bussiness & OpenSource )
Author : Jbuenol
From TechnologicalWiki
Contents |
[edit] History
In 1997, Eric S. Raymond wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In this book, Raymond makes the distinction between two kinds of software development. The first is the conventional closed source development. These kind of development methods are, according to Raymond, like the building of a cathedral; central planning, tight organization and one process from start to finish. The second is the progressive open source development, which is more like a “a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.” The latter analogy is points to the discussion involved in an Open source development process. In some projects, anyone can submit suggestions and discuss them. Fact is, that the ‘coherent and stable systems’ Raymond mentions do emerge from Open source software development projects. Differences between the two styles of development, according to Bar & Fogel, are in general the handling (and creation) of bug reports and feature requests, and the constraints under which the programmers are working. In closed source software development, the programmers are often spending a lot of time dealing with and creating bug reports, as well as handling feature requests. This time is spent on prioritizing and creation of further development plans. This leads to (part of) the development team spending a lot of time on these issues, and not on the actual development. Also, in closed source projects, the development teams must often work under management-related constraints (such as deadlines, budgets, etc.) that interfere with technical issues of the software. In open source software development, these issues are solved by integrating the users of the software in the development process, or even letting these users build the system themselves.
[edit] Types of open source projects
One can distinguish several different types of open source projects. First, there is the garden variety of software programs and libraries. They are standalone pieces of code. Some might even be dependent on other open source projects. These projects serve a specified purpose and fill a definite need. Examples of this type of project include the Linux kernel, the Firefox web-browser and OpenOffice.org office suite of tools.
Distributions are another type of open source project. Distributions are collections of software that are published from the same source with a common purpose. The most prominent example of a "distribution" is an operating system. There are a large number of Linux distributions (such as Debian, Fedora Core, Mandriva, Slackware, etc.) which ship the Linux kernel along with many user-land components. There are also other distributions, like ActivePerl, the Perl programming language for various operating system, and even the OpenCD and cygwin distributions of open-source programs for Microsoft Windows.
Other open source projects, like the BSD derivatives, maintain the source code of an entire operating system, the kernel and all of its core components, in one revision control system; developing the entire system together as a single team. These operating system development projects closely integrate their tools: more so than in the other distribution-based systems.
Finally, there is the book or standalone document project. These items usually do not ship as part of an open source software package. The Linux Documentation Project hosts many such projects that document various aspects of the GNU/Linux operating system. There are many other examples of this type of open source project.
[edit] Tools used for open source development
[edit] Communication channels
Developers and users of an open source project are not all necessarily working on the project in proximity. They require some electronic means of communications. E-mail is one of the most common forms of communication among open source developers and users. Often, electronic mailing lists are used to make sure e-mail messages are delivered to all interested parties at once. This ensures that at least one of the members can reply to it (in private or to the whole mailing list). In order to communicate in real time, many projects use an instant messaging method such as IRC (although there are many others available). Web forums have recently become a common way for users to get help with problems they encounter when using an open source product. Wikis have become common as a communication medium for developers and users.
[edit] Software engineering tools
[edit] Version control systems
In Open Source Software development the participants, who are mostly volunteers, are distributed amongst different geographic regions so there is need for tools to aid participants to collaborate in the development of source code.
Concurrent Versions System (CVS) is a prominent example of a source code collaboration tool being used in OSS projects. CVS helps manage the files and codes of a project when several people are working on the project at the same time. CVS allows several people to work on the same file at the same time. This is done by moving the file into the users’ directories and then merging the files when the users are done. CVS also enables one to easily retrieve a previous version of a file.
The Subversion revision control system (svn) was created to replace CVS. It is quickly gaining ground as an OSS project version control system.
There are many other version control systems.
[edit] Bug trackers and task lists
Most large-scale projects require a bug tracker (usually web or otherwise Internet based) to keep track of the status of various issues in the development of the project. A simple text file is not sufficient, because they have many such bugs, and because they wish to facilitate reporting and maintenance of bugs by users and secondary developers. Some popular bug trackers include:
- Bugzilla - a sophisticated bug tracker from the Mozilla house. Web-based.
- Mantis - a web-based PHP/MySQL bug tracker.
- Trac - integrating a bug tracker with a wiki, and an interface to the Subversion version control system.
- Request tracker - written in Perl. Given as a default to CPAN modules - see rt.cpan.org.
- GNATS - The GNU Bugtracking system.
- SourceForge and its forks provide a bug tracker as part of its services. As a result many projects hosted at SourceForge.net and similar services default to using it.
- LibreSource
- SharpForge includes forums, work item tracking, release management, wiki and version control management
- Jira - Atlassian's project management and issue tracking tool.
[edit] Testing tools
Since Open Source Software projects undergo frequent integration, tools that help automate testing during system integration are used. An example of such tool is Tinderbox. Tinderbox enables participants in an Open Source Software project to detect errors during system integration. Tinderbox runs a continuous build process and informs users about the parts of source code that have issues and on which platform(s) these issues arise. Furthermore, this tool identifies the author of the offending code. The author is then held responsible for ensuring that error is resolved. Mainly because normal testing tools are quite expensive, open source testing tools are gaining popularity.
A debugger is a computer program that is used to debug (and sometimes test or optimize) other programs. GNU Debugger (GDB) is an example of a debugger used in Open source software development. This debugger offers remote debugging, what makes it especially applicable to Open source software development. Also, some memory leak detectors have been designed to work with GDB.
A memory leak tool or memory debugger is a programming tool for finding memory leaks and buffer overflows. A memory leak is a particular kind of unnecessary memory consumption by a computer program, where the program fails to release memory that is no longer needed. Examples of memory leak detection tools used by Mozilla are the XPCOM Memory Leak tools. Validation tools are used to check if pieces of code conform to the specified syntax. They are most often used in the context of HTML/XML, but can also be used with programming languages. An example of a validation tool is LCLint, now called Splint.
[edit] Package management
A package management system is a collection of tools to automate the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages from a computer. The Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) for .rpm and Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) for .deb file format, are package management systems used by a number of Linux distributions.
[edit] Publicizing a project ( Open Souce Repositories )
A source code repository is a place where large amounts of source code are kept, either publicly or privately. They are often used by multi-developer projects to handle various versions and developers submitting various patches of code in an organized fashion. CVS is a popular GNU project to handle these issues and is common in open source projects.
Exist several source code repositories where projects can be hosted by the users. The main repositories are the following ones:
