Patently ridiculous
| Date | 01 June 2004 |
| Pages | 231-237 |
| Published date | 01 June 2004 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07378830410543557 |
| Author | Judith Wusteman |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
About XML
Patently ridiculous
Judith Wusteman
The author
Judith Wusteman is based in the Department of Library and
Information Studies, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.
Keywords
Computer software, Public domain software,
Extensible Markup Language, Libraries
Abstract
The Open Source Software movement has much to offer the
library community. But can it survive the onslaught of patent
applications?
Electronic access
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is
available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
The open alternative
In May 2003, the local government in Munich
voted to delete Microsoft Windows from its 14,000
computers and to install Linux, an open source
operating system. Microsoft was so concerned that
its chief executive, Steve Ballmer, interrupted his
skiing holiday in Switzerland to try and persuade
Munich’s mayor to change his mind, but in vain
(The Economist, 2003). The Munich decision
reflects a worldwide trend: governments across
Latin America, Europe and Asia are moving
towards open source software. In some cases, the
impetus is economic, in some political, and in
some it is based on a respect for good software.
Governments do not want to be reliant on
proprietary standards or tied to commercial
vendors, particularly when their products have a
history of unreliability and poor security.
Open source software
The term “open source software” (OSS) was not
coined until 1998[1], but the movement evolved
from the Free Software initiative[2] that emergedin
the 1970s. One of free so ftware’s most influential
figures is Richard Stallman, author of the Emacs
Editor and founder of the Free Software
Foundation[3], which has overseen the creation of
GNU operating s ystem components. I t was
Stallman who coined the terms “freeware” and
“copyleft”to describe concepts very similar to those
epitomised in today’s OSS. Stallman explains the
origins of the term “copyleft” as follows[4]:
Proprietary software developers use copyright to
take away the users’ freedom; we use copyright to
guarantee their freedom. That’s why we reverse the
name, changing “copyright” into “copyleft”.
Stallman used his concept of copyleft to license
GNU. The GNU General Public License (GNU
GPL, or simply GPL), forms the basis of the
licence that is still used by much of the OSS
community today. However, use of the GPL can
prevent the code it licences being included in
commercial software. When Netscape released its
source code in 1998, it used a license that would
facilitate such commercial uses. The term “open
source” was created to cover this wider definition
of free software. All W3C software is described as
“Open Source/Free Software, and GPL
compatible”[5].
Software labelled as “open source” implies much
more than simply access to its source code. It also
Library Hi Tech
Volume 22 · Number 2 · 2004 · pp.231-237
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited · ISSN 0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/07378830410543557
Received 11 March 2004
Revised 12 March 2004
Accepted 19 March 2004
231
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