OSICT

Open source software and its applications has become the hottest topic in the computing world today. The effects of this revolutionary trend in the development of ICT devices and services is being felt world wide. You may not realise it, but you too are now using open source software on a daily basis!

Copyleft

Put simply, open source software means software that has been released under what is known as a "copyleft" license. That is, the source code (i.e. the computer program instructions) is made available as a download.

This license grants - to the person who downloaded the software - the freedom to inspect, modify and redistribute the software.

One way to understand this is that copyleft is the opposite to "copyright". Rather than take away freedoms it instead grants them to others.

What are the advantages?

It may not be immediately obvious why releasing software under a fancy "copyleft" license agreement should have lead to a sea-shift in the ICT world.

Some of the most important reasons are:

1) By releasing the source code of computer applications, others can adapt the applications to their own needs.

2) The knowledge and insights of the original programmer can be reused and extended by later generations of developers.

3) As open source programs are free to download, it is easier for people to try out new software, which helps in the spread of new applications.

4) Communities of users and developers build up around an application, which means that the application has the benefit of many hundreds or thousands of people's combined wisdom.

5) The ability for a world-wide community to inspect open source code means that bugs and security weakensses can be found quickly and fixed equally quickly.