Open Source Computing

Week 5, Sept 22 and 24

Starting this week, I want an emailed weekly report from each team! You don't have to say much, but I want updates on project choices and other major choices. Each team should designate one person to be the "reporter" who will send the report to me.

Open Source as a business

    "Open Core"

Wednesday: start with Postgres

Linux history

What made Linux such a successful open-source project? Why did Linux beat BSD?
The email from Linus Torvalds to Mauro Carvalho illustrates two things:
  1. Torvalds' somewhat abusive style
  2. Torvalds' firm no-regression policy: user code that used to work should never be broken by a kernel update.

How do these factors play out in the success of Linux?

A third factor is Torvalds' policy on contributions: all are welcome, but they start out as non-mainline extensions, patches or modules.

386BSD

LibreOffice, bash


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