APerez_NYU

Of Birkenstocks and Wingtips

I write this with a heavy heart - thirty-six hours ago, a strong earthquake shook Pakistan. As the death toll rises, I can't help but wonder... how is it that it seems those who have so little always seem to lose it?

Amongst thoughts of nineteen thousand deaths, the debate of open source licenses suddendly felt like a minor thing, but it's my homework, so here we go.

In a similar fashion to last week, we had to read an article (if you're looking for the link, please click here ) and then sit and think about it, pondering about what we'd read, and then jotting our thoughts on paper...

The first thing that struck me about this article is what strikes me as a completely different language. I had to read through it more than once in order to be able to grasp what the discussion was all about. I had feared that as I delved into this whole area of learning, I was surrounding myself with a lingo that was all unto itself. I tested my theory with D.; this week he was able to comment about the article, last week he kept asking me what I meant with that whole theory of the relationship of things.

D. defined these two terms as follows:

Open/Open is equivalent to the BSD license, while the main development tree is open source, companies and developers are allowed to develop derivative works and are not required to publish back to the community - they must still make free and open the original source (the original tree) but what they create is theirs. They may choose to distribute in that manner but are not obligated.

Copyleft is GPL publishes to the public domain (this is the source code of many operating systems - such as Linux). Developers which develop under GPL must make their derivative works available to the community.

D. also said that the way they put this to use in some companies is kind of like this: some people develop code and make it available back to the community, others make money by selling support contracts to people that buy the open source. Since the license says that you only have to provide the source code (not the compiled program) you can also sell the compiled and 'quality tested' code. Still others will find a way to work around the GPL license by modifying the source and creating a border program between the open source code and their 'closed' application. They keep their modifications open, but their applications are closed (and obviously, sold).

As I write this, I'm trying to think in terms all of us can understand, even those that are not involved with this class (not that anybody outside of this class would read this, but you never know), so, that being said, now (finally!) let's begin...

This whole discussion about Open Source made me think of the whole saga that's going on in the yoga world. Yoga is thousands of years old, however there is a gentleman by the name of C.Bikram who is trying to 'trademark' twenty-six poses and sue anybody who tries to practice the same way that he does. No, I'm not making this up, you can read about it here: Yoga & Open Source in yoga circles this is almost as big a deal as Yoga Zone (don't worry, I won't go into that now). Imagine the scandal! Yoga which is all about lovingkindness and understanding has a very big skeleton in a closet, big enough to spawn a couple of articles in magazines that have nothing to do with Yoga!!

I had to start by understanding more of what Open Source was, I really like the definition that was offered here: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

That makes it sound like a utopian type of situation, one where everybody is willing to share, and work off of each other. In a world where great empires exist, where lawsuits are fought over things like an internet explorer (remember when we had more choices than just IE? The days of Netscape, Mosaic?) it seems that a world where the wheel doesn't have to be constantly reinvented can exist only in the minds of those who will never be involved with the project itself.

Could such a utopian world be found in education?

posted by ap @ 4:13 PM