Open Source Computing

Week 5

Monday, Feb 9

Weekly team assignments in Sakai

This week: Have you all communicated? How far have you gotten in terms of selecting a project? Only one member of your group needs to post.

Licenses

Dual
Ethical
Weird licenses

Calculator

Open Source as a business

    "Open Core"

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: working user code 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