Community source

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Community Source is a type of software development used in colleges and universities that builds on the practices of Free Software communities. The software of these collective efforts are distributed via an approved Free Software Foundation licence. [1] Examples include the Sakai Project, Kuali, and Open Source Portfolio. Copyright for the software is often held by an independent foundation (organized as a 501c3 corporation in the United States) modeled on the contributor agreements, licensing, and distribution practices of the Apache Foundation.

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Description

An important distinctive characteristic of community source as opposed to plain open source is that the community includes some organizations or institutions that are committing their resources to the community, in the form of human resources or other financial elements. In this way, the open source project will have both more solid support, rather than purely volunteer efforts as found in other open source communities, and will possibly be shaped by the strategic requirements of the institution committing the resource.

Brad Wheeler has noted that Community Source can be understood as a hybrid model of a community like "The Pub between the Cathedral and the Bazaar where higher education can really solve its [application] software challenges. References below provide more details regarding the use of community source as a practice in higher education.

The Community Source Model in Higher Education (Excerpt from Wheeler, 2007 in References)

The Community Source Model is a hybrid model that blends elements of directed development, in the classic sense of an organization employing staff and resources to work on a project, and the openness of traditional open-source projects like Apache. The resulting software is available under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license. The code can be examined, changed, redistributed, sold, or incorporated into other products without fee. Anyone can make changes, and subject to quality review, those changes can be incorporated back into an open-source application for the benefit of all.

The distinguishing feature of the Community Source Model is that many of the investments of developers' time, design, and project governance come from institutional contributions by colleges, universities, and some commercial firms rather than from individuals. These contributions may be tendered as the first phase of a project, and then additional work may be contributed on an ongoing, voluntary basis by those institutions with a continuing interest in the project. The project often establishes a software framework and baseline functionality, and then the community develops additional features as needed over time.

Community Source Model projects generally operate as follows. Several institutions realize they are trying to solve a similar problem—need for a research administration system is a recent example. After some discussions and resulting agreement on project objectives, timelines, and philosophy, the institutions pool their resources under a project board of institutional leaders. The institutions are often agreeing to tender existing staff time to the direction of the project, and as such, this is not a new cash outlay but rather an aggregation of existing staff in a virtual organization. A grant from a foundation may provide cohesion among the investors. Typical recent projects have ranged from $1 to $8 million in funding and from twelve to thirty months in duration. Each investor signs a Corporate Contributor Agreement that grants a copyright license for the software to the project or foundation (modeled on the practice of the Apache Foundation). The project usually operates on a date-driven delivery schedule. This forces difficult decisions in the reality triangle of balancing features, resources, and time, but such a schedule is essential to the growth of community confidence.

The project board then establishes the appropriate structure for articulating the system requirements, the technical choices, and a project manager. It is essential that clear roles and responsibilities be established early, and the project participants will benefit from spending some face-to-face time together at the beginning of the project. Experience reveals that some staff members may not work well in distributed, virtual organizations, whereas others find the work to be career-renewing.

Early projects had to transition from an investor-based project to a community and a foundation. New projects can take advantage of the foundations' existing infrastructure and how-to knowledge and can begin as a project of a foundation. There is no rulebook for Community Source Model projects for every domain, but there is a growing body of accumulated wisdom on how to coordinate institutional investments and execute a development plan for quality software.

Community source software licensing

Community source software licensing is when the source code to proprietary software is licensed to members of a defined community, each member of which must explicitly enter an agreement with the code owner in order to be permitted access to source code. By this definition, community source licenses are incompatible with both open source and free software, since in open source and free software anyone may have access to source code without entering into an agreement with anyone else, though they must accept the license.

A community source license cannot meet the requirements of the Open Source Definition, whose first provision requires free redistribution of software. A community source license cannot meet the requirements of The Free Software Definition, since freedoms 1 (freedom to study) and 3 (freedom to modify and distribute modified versions to anyone) require open access to source code.

A community source license may violate other provisions of the open source and free software definitions.

One motivation for community source may be to promote the use of software production and development models similar to those used in open source communities. But because the community is not open, those production and development models must differ in subtle or marked ways from those used in open source.[ citation needed ] Another motivation may be to ease adoption by customers of complex software from a proprietary supplier, using trusted intermediaries to help.

Examples of community source licenses

See also

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Free software Software licensed to preserve user freedoms

Free software or libre software, infrequently known as freedom-respecting software, is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial companies to review and modify the source code, blueprint or design for their own customization, curiosity or troubleshooting needs. Open-source licensed software is mostly available free of charge, though this does not necessarily have to be the case.

Apache License Free software license developed by the ASF

The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties. The ASF and its projects release their software products under the Apache License. The license is also used by many non-ASF projects.

The Open Software License (OSL) is a software license created by Lawrence Rosen. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has certified it as an open-source license, but the Debian project judged version 1.1 to be incompatible with the DFSG. The OSL is a copyleft license, with a termination clause triggered by filing a lawsuit alleging patent infringement.

Open-source software Software licensed to ensure source code usage rights

Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner. Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite. The ability to examine the code facilitates public trust in the software.

In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but also a split in the developer community; as such, it is a form of schism. Grounds for forking are varying user preferences and stagnated or discontinued development of the original software.

Source-available software is software released through a source code distribution model that includes arrangements where the source can be viewed, and in some cases modified, but without necessarily meeting the criteria to be called open-source. The licenses associated with the offerings range from allowing code to be viewed for reference to allowing code to be modified and redistributed for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Commercial software, or seldom payware, is a computer software that is produced for sale or that serves commercial purposes. Commercial software can be proprietary software or free and open-source software.

Open-source hardware Hardware from the open-design movement

Open-source hardware (OSH) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open-design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) and open-source hardware are created by this open-source culture movement and apply a like concept to a variety of components. It is sometimes, thus, referred to as FOSH. The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned so that others can make it – coupling it closely to the maker movement. Hardware design, in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all released under free/libre terms. The original sharer gains feedback and potentially improvements on the design from the FOSH community. There is now significant evidence that such sharing can drive a high return on investment for the scientific community.

Free/open-source software – the source availability model used by free and open-source software (FOSS) – and closed source are two approaches to the distribution of software.

This comparison only covers software licenses which have a linked Wikipedia article for details and which are approved by at least one of the following expert groups: the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, the Debian Project and the Fedora Project. For a list of licenses not specifically intended for software, see List of free-content licences.

License proliferation is the phenomenon of an abundance of already existing and the continued creation of new software licenses for software and software packages in the FOSS ecosystem. License proliferation affects the whole FOSS ecosystem negatively by the burden of increasingly complex license selection, license interaction, and license compatibility considerations.

License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.

Free content Creative work with few or no restrictions on how it may be used

Free content, libre content, or free information is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work.

Companies whose business centers on the development of open-source software employ a variety of business models to solve the challenge of how to make money providing software that is by definition licensed free of charge. Each of these business strategies rests on the premise that users of open-source technologies are willing to purchase additional software features under proprietary licenses, or purchase other services or elements of value that complement the open-source software that is core to the business. This additional value can be, but not limited to, enterprise-grade features and up-time guarantees to satisfy business or compliance requirements, performance and efficiency gains by features not yet available in the open source version, legal protection, or professional support/training/consulting that are typical of proprietary software applications.

Free-software license License allowing software modification and redistribution

A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.

Proprietary software, also known as non-free software or closed-source software, is computer software for which the software's publisher or another person reserves some licensing rights to use, modify, share modifications, or share the software, restricting user freedom with the software they lease. It is the opposite of open-source or free software. Non-free software sometimes includes patent rights.

GNU General Public License Series of free software licenses

The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and were originally written by the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman, for the GNU Project. The license grant the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.

Open-core model Business model monetizing commercial open-source software

The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. Coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008, the open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software.

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.

References

  1. "List of FSF Approved licences". Archived from the original on 2001-07-28.