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Frequently Asked Questions about Open SourceIsn't it hard to get reliable support for open-source software?Absolutely not! InfoWorld's 1997 `Best Product of the Year' roundup should have demolished this myth once and for all. Read the article to see their analysis, including this quote:...readers who are using Linux in a business environment said they found the support they received to be far more impressive than what they were used to with commercial software.Linux is not an exception. In fact, business users will generally find that mature open-source products are far more reliable to begin with, and that when support is needed it is dramatically cheaper and easier to get than from closed vendors.
But there aren't any real applications for open-source operating systems, are there?Do the Oracle, Informix, and InterBase databases count? How about Word Perfect and the Corel office suite? Have you checked out the ApplixWare and StarOffice suites? We've got all of these and more.We're building and porting more and better applications all the time at a pace closed developers cannot match. Go to the Linux Mall, for example, to learn about the wide selection of office suites and productivity tools now available under Linux. The Linux Business Solutions Project maintains a list of mainstream business applications available under Linux. There's a widespread belief that the population of technical people who have written and maintained most open source up to now don't have the motivation or competence to write `real' office-type applications with user-friendly GUI interfaces. There's some good evidence this belief is false (such as the GIMP, KDE, and Gnome projects). More importantly, there's no good reason to think it's true. Fifteen years ago people were saying "The free software people build some nice toys and demos, but they haven't got what it takes to build real tools". The FSF proved them wrong. Five years ago the same people said "OK, GNU is a nifty programmer's toolkit but they'll never build a viable operating system." Linux proved them wrong again. Now they're saying "OK, so Linux is a nice sandbox for hackers and it does Internet pretty well, but they'll never build decent end-user applications." If the naysayers are right this time, it will be a first.
Doesn't closed source help protect against crack attacks?This is exactly backwards, as any cryptographer will tell you. Security through obscurity just does not work.The reason it doesn't work is that security-breakers are a lot more motivated and persistent than good guys (who have lots of other things to worry about). The bad guys will find the holes whether source is open or closed (for a perfect recent example of this see The Tao of Windows NT Buffer Overflow). Closed sources do three bad things. One: they create a false sense of security. Two: they mean that the good guys will not find holes and fix them. Three: they make it harder to distribute trustworthy fixes when a hole is revealed. In fact, open-source operating systems and applications are generally much more security-safe than their closed-source counterparts. When the "Ping o'Death" exploit was revealed in 1997 (for example) Linux had fix patches within hours. Closed-source OSs didn't plug the hole for months.
Are you guys opposed to intellectual property rights?The Open Source campaign does not have a position on whether ideas can be owned, whether patents are good or bad, or any of the related controversies. We think the economic self-interest arguments for Open Source are strong enough that nobody needs to go on any moral crusades about it.
What's the relationship between open source and Linux?Linux is an open-source operating system, and to date the most dramatically successful open-source platform. It's believed to have somewhere between 4 and 27 million users, with best estimates towards the upper end of that range. Linux is very popular in education, Internet service applications, software development shops, and (increasingly) in small businesses. Several successful companies market Linux and Linux applications.Linux isn't the whole open-source story, however. There are many other open-source operating systems and applications available, including Netscape's Navigator and Communicator client line of Web browsers.
How is `open source' related to `free software'?Open Source is a marketing program for free software. It's a pitch for `free software' on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping. The winning substance has not changed, the losing attitude and symbolism have. See the discussion of marketing for hackers for more.So that it is clear what kind of software we are talking about, we publish a definition and have made Open Source a `certification mark (a special form of trademark) to be applied only to software that meets that definition.
Isn't there another entity called `open source' or `Open Source'?There are several. The term `open source' has a technical meaning in the intelligence community; it refers to publicly accessible intelligence sources such as newspapers. One is a company that distributes the text of large contracts. One is a defunct supplier for NeXT systems. Fortunately, they are all in different trademark categories.
How do I use the term `open source'?The phrase `open source' standing by itself is a mass noun. In compounds that use the phrase as an adjectival noun, such as `open-source software', follow normal English usage and hyphenate.It isn't necessary to capitalize the phrase unless referring to the certification mark itself or to the Open Source campaign. Once per document (on or near first citation) it should be noted that Open Source is a trademark.
Can you give me some Open Source sound bites to use?The one-sentence version:
Open source promotes software reliability and quality by supporting independent peer review and rapid evolution of source code. The one-paragraph version:
Open source promotes software reliability and quality by supporting independent peer review and rapid evolution of source code. To be certified as open source, the license of a program must guarantee the right to read, redistribute, modify, and use it freely. For more information, visit the web site, http://www.opensource.org. The full-orchestration, five-part harmony version is this whole site.
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