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MeetingOne

Page history last edited by Harish Pillay 10 years, 10 months ago

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Introduction to Open Technologies

Meeting One, Meeting Two


Why is Open Source so interesting?

  1. History
    1. Early computers from IBM were delivered to customers with full source code
    2. Gene Amdahl left IBM to form Amdahl corporation which began to provide cheaper hardware that were IBM Plug Compatible. The original IBM compatible! Others followed suit - Fujitsu, NEC, CDC etc.
    3. IBM changed the terms of offering the software and only provided the executable and the customer had no more access to the source code.
    4. First time code became closed.
    5. The Altair 8800 computer was an interesting hobbyist machine that the Home Brew Computer Club began showing interest into and was also the target of a early Basic interpreter written by Gates. Gates was upset when the code was freely shared that he wrote a letter complaining about it.
  2. Main players
    1. Richard Stallman was the person whose sense of community and sharabilty was threatened by the increasing numbers of his friends and colleagues from MIT started not to share code/ideas with him once they started working in the companies in Cambrigde.
    2. Linus Torvalds started a project in 1990/91 because the computer he received from his grandfather as a Christmas gift did not have a good operating system and he was eyeing what was available in the university he was attending. So he started work using the Minix code from Prof Tanenbaum. Linus used Minix to bootstrap his work in building an operating system and as he made progress, he replaced parts and pieces with fresh code that suited his way of doing things. He did not quite like the way Minix was built or architected for it did not even do things like TCP/IP networking and so on. Eventually, Linus and Andrew argued in a very public manner - over comp.os.minix about the respective strengths of microkernel vs monolithic kernels etc. While there are things that were essentially true in the early 1990s as far as microkernels are concerned, on today's CPU systems, things can be very interesting. Consider the concept of virtualization. If indeed, Minix is great, you can run it within a virtual environment, such as vmware or Xen.
    3. In the meantime, the world was moving on and the debate with the word Free kept constantly coming up - because of what it means in English 99.99% of the time. RMS's concept of freedom was lost most times and when used in a corporate environment, it does not sound credible. So a group of persons came together to figure out how to address it from a business/enterprise point of view.
  3. Terminology
    1. Free/Libre Open Source Software
  4. Licensing
    1. GPL - The GNU/General Public License
  5. Brief introduction to pure OSS environments
    1. Linux
    2. XWindows
    3. Window managers - KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Blackbox ...
    4. Concept of separation of privilege
  6. Mixing OSS environments with proprietary OSes
    1. cygwin and xwindows under Microsoft Windows
    2. Running a full OSS stack on a closed/proprietary OS
  7. A timeline of the heritage and lineage of Linux

 


 


Resources:

a) IRC channel on freenode.org

b) etherpad on

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