Open Source Technology

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Open Source Initiative

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Motivation

This book is motivated by unavailability of a text book for Open source technology in Rajasthan, India. The book is intended to be an introduction to the Open source technology. At the moment a basic outline is available below.

Outline

Preface
Foreword
Introduction and History
Initiatives, Principle and methodologies
Philosophy
Licenses and Patents
Economics of FOSS
Case Studies : Apache, BSD, Linux, Mozilla (Firefox), Wikipedia, Joomla, GCC, Open Office.
Open Source Projects
Open source applications and its competitors

Syllabus Covered

Unit I

Introduction : Open Source, Free Software, Free Software vs. Open Source software, Public Domain Software, FOSS does not mean no cost. History : BSD, The Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project.

Unit II

Open Source History, Initiatives, Principle and methodologies. Philosophy : Software Freedom, Open Source Development Model Licences and Patents: What Is A License, Important FOSS Licenses (Apache,BSD,GPL, LGPL), copyrights and copylefts, Patents Economics of FOSS : Zero Marginal Cost, Income-generation opportunities, Problems with traditional commercial software, Internationalization

Unit III

Case Studies : Apache, BSD, Linux, Mozilla (Firefox), Wikipedia, Joomla, GCC, Open Office.

Unit IV

Starting and Maintaining an Open Source Project, Open Source Hardware, Open Source Design, Open source Teaching. and Open source media.

Unit V

Open source vs. closed source Open source government, Open source ethics. Social and Financial impacts of open source technology, Shared software, Shared source

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