OEM Companies changing to Open Source

OSS Collaboration and Developer Hangouts i.e. Portals

The needs of the people can only understood by the people, and only the people can provide feasible solutions. However, the solutions need to be updated from time to time, or new ones need to be thought of. Also, there should be a common forum on which all the problems and solutions can be posted. The platform is called the ‘Internet’. The internet provided several hangouts for OSS developers to hang out. They can be summarized here –

SOURCEFORGE

SourceForge is a centralized solution to free hosting to Open Source software and development projects. The essence which went into the making of this site is the Open Source development mode with the aim to create an open and collaborative environment. This collaboration and cooperstion within the Open Source community (developers and end users) promotes a higher standard of quality and efficiency, and helps to ensure the long-term functionality, stability and viability of both data and applications.

SourceForge hosts more than 100,000 projects and has over 1,000,000 registered users with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and code. SourceForge.net has the largest repository of Open Source code and applications available on the Internet. The reason for preference of Open Source is that it has low cost, high quality, value and most importantly, increased freedom of use.

 

The reasons behind the huge success of SourceForge are that it

  • Integrates tools and processes
  • Expands visibility, transparency and control
  • Centralizes and manages development and hosting
  • Cultivates collaboration

It’s structuring and architecture makes tracking, handling, development and uploading very easy for individuals and organizations. Its architecture is also the reason that the portability factor works in favor of it. SourceForge has a very user-friendly interface, having high levels of clarity and functionality. Their central database is fully accessible. It also includes Software Configuration Management systems that provide portability with virtually any tool.

SourceForge provides real-time views into project status and statistics. At a glance, developers can see the centralized status roll-ups across heterogeneous tools environments, providing superior visibility and control.

Open Source software is an integral part of web development these days. And SourceForge has emerged as a leader in this development by resorting to Open Source. It has become of the most famous success stories of today’s world.

 

 

Google Code Search

Google code search is a free tool offered by the master in the searching business, Google. If there is anything that Google masters in, its is search. Google uses its vast web of ‘spiders’ to locate and deliver Open-Source code to developers from repositories world-wide. The code can be searched using operators such as lang:, package:, license: and file:., etc and also in a regular expression format. The code can be obtained in archived forms as well from repositories.

 

GNU SAVANNAH

This developer hangout is a project by the free software foundation which serves as a place for collaborative open source discussions through wikis, mailing lists, web hosting, file hosting and bug tracking services. Savannah runs on Savane, the same software run by the VA Software guys to run Sourceforge, another popular portal described above.
Compared to other portals, Savannah is relatively much stricter in its policies of OSS. It bans the use of non-OSS media such as Flash and any program hosted on Savannah is supposed to have certified the free-software-license the project uses.

BUGZILLA

Released as an Open Source general-purpose bug tracking mechanism by Netscape Communications in 1998, Bugzilla is tool now popularly used to track defects of bugs in many Open Source as well as Proprietary Software. This cross-platform tool is licensed under Mozilla Public License. Currently supported database systems are MySQL and PostgreSQL. Bugzilla is usually installed on Linux and runs using the Apache HTTP Server, which too is an Open Source application.


More on Open Source in Software Industry

Open Source Licenses

Open source software is distributed under a license, just like regular proprietary software is. An open source license is a license with a difference: instead of keeping or expanding the software developer's rights over the product, it basically gives them away.
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Open Source in Web Development

Apache runs the internet. For that matter, it’s been running the internet ever since it’s been around. Apache has been termed the killer application for the Internet.
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Open Source Portals

The needs of the people can only understood by the people, and only the people can provide feasible solutions. However, the solutions need to be updated from time to time, or new ones need to be thought of. Also, there should be a common forum on which all the problems and solutions can be posted.
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Career Opportunities

In our OSS Myth-Busting spree, we noticed that one of the chief misconception people have about open source software companies are all run by volunteers and there isn’t much of a cash flow over there. People believe that OSS developers are just passionate hobbyists and nothing more than that.
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Drawbacks

There is no doubt about the fact that open source has taken the world by storm. Open Source is spearheading the revolution to bring about a change in the world order, where the environment is free, conducive and constructive.
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