On 16th June 2008 the University of Bedfordshire organised a Partnership Showcase. This allowed 3rd year students to present their final year project work to the businesses invited. The university also organised a 2 hour long seminar where the head of department (Prof Carsten Maple) and lectureres (Geraint Williams, Dr Antony Brown and Dr Nik Bessis) did presentations alongside with me, so it was a great honour to be there.
(clicking on the image will open a PDF file with the evening’s schedule)
Let me discuss my presentation hereby. As the article’s title shows I was doing a presentation on Open Source. I had 4 sections in my presentation which are:
- What do we mean by Open Source?
- What are the benefits and issues assiciated with Open Source?
- What’s available and where has it been successful?
- Example project built with Open Source tools
First you have to understand what is the difference between Freeware and Open Source. Many people tend to confuse these two terms however there is a very important difference:in freeware applications you are not able to see the source code. While both freeware and open source are free the significant difference is important as it has an impact on the customisability.
So how does one can really benefit from using open source? As mentioned before the source code is available. This enables businesses to tune and improve their code and it’s also possible to port the code to new hardware, to adapt it to changing conditions (e.g. just think about the business processes. How frequently they change? What if the current software is unable to perform under the new processes? A new software needs to be purchased whereas with open source it would have been a little tweaking of the code).
There is noone with the power to restrict how the software is being used. We all heard the stories where a software vendor decided to stop supporting an application or simply abandoned the project. With open source, it won’t happen. Also software vendors are not able to force businesses into upgrading to their latest software version.
The final benefit is that open source is reliable. A bug in the system is corrected literally within hours and you don’t need to wait for an update, patch or fix for days or weeks.
If there are benefits there must be issues as well, and yes there are some. As open source software is usually written by highly computer literate people they put functionality above everything else, they desire to create a perfectly well functioning application but they forget about the look and feel of the application. Inadequate design indeed has an impact on usage.
Open source applications usually lack proper documentation. What they have is a general guide rather then a manual therefore unless you are an advanced computer user you might have difficulities even installing that specific product.
Finally summing up all these issues we can say that open source applications - sadly - are made by programmers to programmers, who think that if something is straightforward to them, it is straightforward to everybody else.
The top 10 open source applications and tools are as follow:
- Linux
- Mozilla Firefox (which according to the latest browser statistics is used by 39.1% of all internet users)
- Apache
- MySQL (which has more then 11 million installations)
- OpenOffice.org
- The Gimp
- PHP
- OpenSSH
- BitTorrent (which accounts~35% of all internet traffic)
- Audacity
Finally a success story. Following the arrest of a russian teacher back in 2007 who was claimed to use unlicenced Microsoft products at the school where he was teaching the Russian government made an initative to change from Microsoft prodcuts to Open Source products. An investigation revealed the fact that ~70% of software in schools in Russia is unlicensed. The Russian Government is expecting to reduce sofware piracy, boost the local IT industry and avoid IT security risks.
Feel free to download my presentation.