Hello everyone and welcome back to our course on commercial open source software startups

and how to spin them off from university. My name is Dr. Griele and I lead this course.

Today we are starting the second, the middle part of the lectures on this topic. In the first part

we discussed the software industry in general and now we will be discussing open source software,

open source software communities and commercial open source startups and strategies. Today it is

open source software, the first of these four lectures of the middle part and I will be talking

mostly about software as open source software as an artifact, meaning something you build.

And then next session, next lecture will be about the project communities behind these artifacts.

It will be a lot of information. I have a course on open source software of 15 total lectures and

I'm squeezing much of it into this one hour, so bear with me. What is open source software?

Well, open source software has a predecessor called free software defined in the following

years. It was defined in the 80s and 90s of the last century and then open source software

as a term for something that's basically the same in the late 90s. Free software is simply

software where the user gets certain rights and these rights are defined. The user must be allowed

to use, study, modify and distribute the software even in changed form, free of charge and any other

restrictions. Open source software, which was a reaction to a lot of philosophy that didn't make

sense to many of the very pragmatic software developers developing free software and then

open source software. Open source software was coined in reaction to that but basically means the same.

Open source software by way of the open source software definition is software which fulfills

10 criteria but when those have been are being distilled down it's exactly the same. If a user

has the right to use a piece of software, to modify it and to distribute that software,

distributed in a modified form even all of that free of charge and other restrictions, then the

software is open source software. More pragmatically open source software is considered open source

only if it has a license which spells out exactly these rights but also some obligations that are

given to the users, the recipient, the licensee and then some piece of software becomes open

source software if it has such an open source license as defined and accepted by the open

source software initiative. Free software and open source software for all practical purposes are the

same. The host or definer of free open source, free software is the free software foundation and of

open source software is the open source initiative and we often just merge these terms and talk about

FOSS or free and open source software though I in general just talk about open source as the general term.

And we know open source software. There's a lot of it and there's a lot of good software that is open

source software and as an end user you may have seen many of it already. There's no domain really

where open source software is not present whether it's video editing software like blender or

technical software like the Apache web server or office software like the open office or Libre office

suite of office tools, word processors etc. etc. or whether it's enterprise software like sugar CRM or

Jaspersoft. Open source is everywhere for every domain and conceivable use open source software

is being developed and that makes it an important force to reckon with because if there's high

quality free to use software available then potential competitors non-open source competitors

usually have to fight hard to survive.

So let's take a look at the history of open source. In the beginning when software was being coined

and recognized as an independent artifact separate from hardware there was a little recognition

initially of software itself but certainly not of open source software. The term the concept of open

or free software at the later time wasn't even recognized as such. However people were often

freely sharing source code because the little value was the tech cost. So the concept of open

or free software was attached to it. In the 80s that changed because companies recognizing

the commercial value of software were closing it down upsetting in particular a person called

Richard Stallman who decided to fight this trend of closing software by inventing free software.

The idea of free software and the idea of licenses to ensure software in his words would remain

free. The outcome of this work is the family of open source of free software licenses called the

GNU licenses. In the 90s in reaction partly to Stallman being philosophical even aggressive about