Open Source Organics

A few days ago while browsing for the plays scripted by Shakespeare; I stumbled upon free software called: OpenSourceShakespeare. This had me intrigued enough to write a blog about the organics of open source technologies and thinking about the reasons why I had littered my disk space with all the Open source software’s available.

At some point in the past all of us would have surely speculated: 
What is it that makes open source technologies so popular??

My answer to this is: As humans, all of us feel that a million open minds can’t be wrong. This is what makes open source software’s the most sought after technology in the current time. In his IEEE paper, Gregory DeKoenigsberg has stated that - "Red Hat routinely hires entry level engineers from the Fedora community, with the benefit of having already worked directly with these engineers on real world problems ".  The reason clearly describes what the Open source community believes : "Open source represents true meritocracy and weed out participants who are unwilling to teach themselves".

Having worked on the development of Android phones, I have vastly used open source technology's like Ubuntu, Apache, Android, Linux etc.  

These technologies allure users because they don’t cost a penny!! As for the developers, it’s more like playing with ‘Lego toys’, you get the blocks for free and you can build applications using these blocks. Surely the hardest job in open source is picking the winner.

In the current century, our lives are totally dependent on the services provided by Google: Google Search, Gmail, Google calendar. I find it hard to select any other company whose technology is embedded this deeply into my day to day life. So just imagine a phone which gives you all this in your home screen and at your finger's tip. Until a few years back, applications and games for mobile phones were designed by the developers in big mobile handset companies. Google Android is an Open source project that has made this a thing of the past. Now even a college freshman can download the Android SDK and use his imagination to develop innovative apps which can be uploaded onto the Android Market and gross money like you have never imagined.

A really nice example to elucidate about the benefits of Open Source technologies like Google Android is by telling you about something funny that happened in the mobile gaming world last month.  Whilst all the game designers were busy developing sophisticated mobile games, the game that was downloaded the maximum number of times on the Android market was the one that seriously bucked the trend: Flappy Bird”!!!  

And once again the Open source nature of Google Android made it possible for the developer to publish his game and earn millions.  

Along with the ease of installing applications comes the risk of downloading malicious applications onto the phones. Charlie Miller, in his publication has elucidated how the App Store and Android Market take different approaches to limit malicious app performing on their devices. The features Charlie Miller proposed include code signing, app source, removed app and sandbox. 

• Code Signing
• iOS app developers have to use the code signing which is proposed by apple
• Android developers can use self-signing code on the Android apps 
• App Source
• Users can obtain apps from the App store based on Apple's unique signing code.
• The self-signing code in Android can let apps to be downloaded from not only the Android market but also from other sources.
• Removed App
• In App store, all apps are checked by reviewers before putting them on the store. If any malicious apps are detected, they are removed and not installed in the app store
• In Android market, instead of using a top-down approach to malware prevention, it uses crowd sourcing which is based on the user's comments on apps. Only if a user complains, an App will be removed from the Android Market.
• Sandbox
• Apple offers the sandbox on iOS which uses the approach "One size fits all" to control and access apps. This means each app cannot access and read other application's files. 
• In Android, sandbox approach is application specific. During installation, applications require the user's permission to access other application's files.User's can agree or reject these permission's. This approach is much better than the one-size-fits-all.  But the downside is that it compels the users to make security decisions, which history has shown to be a bad method.

        

“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.”  - Frank Zappa

Recently during a discussion with a bunch of friends we were speaking about how Netflix can charge as little as $8 per month for its services?? Yup everything is built on open source software!! They have all the infrastructure established so it's an easy task for them.
“Too many cooks spoil the broth” is a saying of the past now. As for the developers what’s more apt is: “The more, the merrier”.  More intelligent developers ensure that the software is more stable and secure than the proprietary software because anyone can spot a bug and even have the code to analyze and fix it.

So it's time for all of us to divulge our attention towards using all the open source technologies available out there!! 

References:
IEEE papers 
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6359654

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6381072

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4556977&queryText%3Dopen+source

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=927045&queryText%3Dopen+source

GNU Project: www.gnu.org
Free Software Foundation: www.fsf.org
Linux kernel: www.linux.org
Apache web server: http://httpd.apache.org