IBM to employees: Use Firefox

Technology giant IBM wants its workers around the world to use free, open-source Mozilla Firefox as their window into the Internet.

"Any employee who is not now using Firefox will be strongly encouraged to use it as their default browser," IBM executive Bob Sutor said yesterday in a blog post at his sutor.com website.

"While other browsers have come and gone, Firefox is now the gold standard for what an open, secure, and standards-compliant browser should be."

Making Firefox the default browser means that workers' computers will automatically use that software to access the Internet unless commanded to do differently.

All new computers for IBM employees will have Firefox installed and the global company "will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox," according to Sutor.

New York State-based IBM, known by the nickname "Big Blue," has a corporate history dating back a century and now reportedly has nearly 400,000 workers.

"Today we already have thousands of employees using it on Linux, Mac, and Windows laptops and desktops, but we're going to be adding thousands more users to the rolls," Sutor said.

Sutor is the vice president of open source and Linux at IBM, which launched an Open Source Initiative in 1998.
Open-source software is essentially treated as public property, with improvements made by any shared with all. Firefox is the second most popular Web browser in an increasingly competitive market dominated by Internet Explorer software by Microsoft.

Google Chrome has been steadily gaining market share, last week replacing Apple Safari as the third most popular Web browser in the United States.

"We'll continue to see this or that browser be faster or introduce new features, but then another will come along and be better still, including Firefox," Sutor said.

"I think it was Firefox and its growth that reinvigorated the browser market as well as the web. That is, Firefox forced competitors to respond."

Some Open Source Software Packages

This is a list of Free software / open source software packages: computer software licensed under an open source license / Free software license. Software that fits the Free software definition may be more appropriately called free software; the GNU project in particular objects to their works being referred to as open source. However, nearly all software meeting the Open Source Definition also meets The Free Software Definition and vice versa. Some of the softwares that meets either is listed here.

Computer-aided design softwares:

Archimedes(CAD):
Archimedes - "The Open CAD" - (aka Arquimedes) is a computer-aided design (CAD) program being developed with direct input from architects and architecture firms. With this design philosophy, the developers hope to create software better suited for architecture than the currently widely used AutoCAD, and other available CAD software. The program is free software released under the GNU General Public License.

AutoQ3D:
AutoQ3D is an OpenGL based software used for 3D modeling. It is written in C++ using Trolltech Qt libraries. It is released under the GNU General Public License, making it free software.

Ayam:
Ayam is a free 3D modelling environment for the RenderMan interface.


AutoREALM:
AutoREALM is an open source program designed to draw maps for role-playing games, mainly in fantasy settings. The program is similar to the commercial Campaign Cartographer.

Computer simulation softwares:

SimPy:
It is a queue-theoretic event-based simulator written in Python. It is a process-based, object-oriented discrete-event simulation language.

Blender:
It is a 3D modeling software written in Python and C++ that can make animations and games. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications, including games.

Speech Synthesis/Speech Recognition Softwares:

CMU Sphinx:
CMU Sphinx, also called Sphinx in short, is the general term to describe a group of speech recognition systems developed at Carnegie Mellon University. These include a series of speech recognizers (Sphinx 2 - 4) and an acoustic model trainer (SphinxTrain).

Festival Speech Synthesis System:
Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system originally developed at Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh.


Flash animation Softwares:
Pencil:
Pencil is a 2D graphical animation software that runs on Mac, Windows, Linux and BSD. Pencil uses a unique bitmap/vector drawing interface to produce simple 2D graphics as well as animation. Pencil is written in C++ and is Qt-based. The application license is GNU General Public License.

SWFTools
SWFTools is a suite of software tools to create and manipulate SWF files. SWF is the file format used by Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) animation software. SWFTools runs on Windows, Mac OS X, AmigaOS, Linux and several other Unix-like systems. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and is thus free software.

Anti-virus Softwares:

AVG:
AVG is an umbrella term for a range of anti-virus and internet security software for the Microsoft Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD computing platforms, developed by AVG Technologies, a privately held Czech company formerly known as Grisoft.

ClamAV:
Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) is a free, cross-platform antivirus software tool-kit capable of detecting many types of malicious software, including viruses. One of its main uses is on mail servers as a server-side email virus scanner. The application was developed for Unix and has third party versions available for AIX, BSD, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS X, OpenVMS, OSF and Solaris. At one time it had a native version available for Windows, but that project has been ended. Both ClamAV and its updates are made available free of charge.

Media Player Softwares:

VLC media player:
VLC media player is an open source, free software media player written by the VideoLAN project. VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats.

VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but that meaning is now deprecated. It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS, Syllable, BSD, MorphOS, Solaris and Sharp Zaurus, and is widely used with over 100 million downloads for version 0.8.6.

Media Player Classic:
Media Player Classic (MPC) is a compact media player for Microsoft Windows. The application mimics the look and feel of the old, light-weight Windows Media Player 6.4 but integrates most options and features found in modern media players. It and its heirs are standard media players in the K-Lite Codec Pack and the Combined Community Codec Pack.

Office Application Softwares:

OpenOffice.org:
OpenOffice.org (OO.o or OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is an office application suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It is distributed as free software and written using the gtk toolkit. It supports the ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office formats among others.

KOffice:
KOffice is a cross-platform office suite for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). All its components are released under free software/open source licenses and use OpenDocument as their native file format when possible.



Go-oo:
Go-oo (previously called ooo-build) is a concentrated set of patches for the cross-platform OpenOffice.org office suite. Go-oo is also one of OpenOffice.org variants created from these patches. It has better support for Office Open XML file formats than the official OpenOffice.org releases produced by Sun Microsystems, and other enhancements that have either not yet been accepted into the upstream Sun version, or will not be because of business or political reasons.

Free Software

Free software, software libre or libre sofware is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-facing hardware allow user modifications to their hardware. Free software is available gratis (free of charge) in most cases.

In practice, for software to be distributed as free software, the human-readable form of the program (the source code) must be made available to the recipient along with a notice granting the above permissions. Such a notice either is a "free software license", or a notice that the source code is released into the public domain.

The free software movement was conceived in 1983 by Richard Stallman to satisfy the need for and to give the benefit of "software freedom" to computer users. The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985 to provide the organizational structure which Stallman correctly foresaw would be necessary to advance his Free Software ideas.

Free software, which may or may not be distributed free of charge, is distinct from "freeware" which, by definition, does not require payment for use. The authors or copyright holders of freeware may retain all rights to the software; it is not necessarily permissible to reverse engineer, modify, or redistribute freeware.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Movement.

Since free software may be freely redistributed it is generally available at little or no cost. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as applications, support, training, customization, integration, or certification. At the same time, some business models which work with proprietary software are not compatible with free software, such as those that depend on a user paying for a license in order to lawfully use a software product.

Examples of free software

The Free Software Directory maintains a large database of free software packages. Some of the best-known examples include the Linux Kernel, the BSD and GNU/Linux operating systems, the GNU Compiler Collection and C library; the MySQL relational database; the Apache web server; and the Sendmail mail transport agent. Other influential examples include the emacs text editor; the GIMP raster drawing and image editor; the X Window System graphical-display system; the OpenOffice.org office suite; and the TeX and LaTeX typesetting systems.

The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and UNESCO. It catalogs useful free software that runs under free operating systems - particularly GNU and Linux.

Unlike some other directories that focus on free software, Free Software Directory staff verify the licenses of software listed in the directory. As of September 1, 2009, the Directory lists 6,000 packages.

To view the Free Software Directory Click Here

Mozilla Public License

The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open source software license. Version 1.0 was developed by Mitchell Baker when she worked as a lawyer at Netscape Communications Corporation and version 1.1 at the Mozilla Foundation. The MPL is characterized as a hybridization of the modified BSD license and GNU General Public License.

The MPL is the license for the Mozilla Application Suite, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird and other Mozilla software. The MPL has been adapted by others as a license for their software, most notably Sun Microsystems, as the Common Development and Distribution License for OpenSolaris, the open source version of the Solaris 10 operating system, and by Adobe, as the license for its Flex product line.

Terms

The license is regarded as a weak copyleft. Specifically, source code copied or changed under the MPL must stay under the MPL.

The MPL was approved both as an Open Source software license by the Open Source Initiative and as a Free Software license by the Free Software Foundation.

Compatibility with other licenses

Unlike strong copyleft licenses, the code under the MPL may be combined with proprietary files in one program ("Larger Work"). For example, Netscape 6 and later releases were proprietary versions of the Mozilla Application Suite, by adding the proprietary AIM and other parts. The MPL treats the source code file as the boundary between MPL code and proprietary parts, meaning that a certain source file (e.g., C++, JavaScript or XUL file) is either fully MPL or fully proprietary. The GPL, in contrast, uses the process boundary of the executable as the license boundary (for details, see the GPL article).

Compatibility with GPL

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers the license a free software license, but "not a strong copyleft" one. However, "unlike the X11 license" the license has "some complex restrictions" making it incompatible with the GNU GPL. They urge people not to use the license because of this incompatibility unless the provision in section 13 of the MPL is exercised to provide the work under either the GPL or any other GPL-compatible license.

For these reasons, the Mozilla Suite and Firefox have been relicensed under multiple licenses, including the MPL, GPL and LGPL.

MPL-based licenses

* Common Development and Distribution License
* Sun Public License
* gSOAP Public License
* AROS Public License
* SugarCRM Public License
* Common Public Attribution License
* Erlang Public License
* Yahoo! Public License

Eclipse Public License

The Eclipse Public License (EPL) is an open source software license used by the Eclipse Foundation for its software. It replaces the Common Public License (CPL) and removes certain terms relating to patent litigation.

The Eclipse Public License is designed to be a business friendly free software license, and features weaker copyleft provisions than contemporary licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL). The receiver of EPL-licensed programs can use, modify, copy and distribute the work and modified versions, in some cases being obligated to release their own changes.

The EPL is approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF)

MIT License

The MIT License is a free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), used by the MIT X Consortium.

It is a permissive license, meaning that it permits reuse within proprietary software on the condition that the license is distributed with that software. The license is also GPL-compatible, meaning that the GPL permits combination and redistribution with software that uses the MIT License.

According to the Free Software Foundation, the MIT License is more accurately called the X11 license, since MIT has used many licenses for software and the license was first drafted for the X Window System.

Software packages that use the MIT License include Expat, PuTTY, the Mono development platform class libraries, Ruby on Rails, Lua 5.0 onwards and the X Window System, for which the license was written.

Some software packages dual license their products under the MIT License, such as the JavaScript library jQuery, which is licensed under both the MIT and GNU General Public License licenses.

The license is as follows:

Copyright (c)  

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU project.

The GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft. Under this philosophy, the GPL grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved, even when the work is changed or added to. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD licenses are the standard examples.

The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a modified, more permissive, version of the GPL, originally intended for some software libraries. There is also a GNU Free Documentation License, which was originally intended for use with documentation for GNU software, but has also been adopted for other uses, such as the Wikipedia project.

The Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL) is a similar license with a focus on networking server software. The GNU AGPL is similar to the GNU General Public License, except that it additionally covers the use of the software over a computer network, requiring that the complete source code be made available to any network user of the AGPLed work, for example a web application. The Free Software Foundation recommends that this license is considered for any software that will commonly be run over the network.

The text of the GPL is not itself under the GPL. The license's copyright disallows modification of the license. Copying and distributing the license is allowed since the GPL requires recipients get "a copy of this License along with the Program". According to the GPL FAQ, anyone can modify the license as long as they use a different name for the license, not mention "GNU" and remove the preamble. The preamble can be used in a modified license with permission of the FSF. However, the only license to have permission of the preamble was version 1 of the Affero General Public License.

BSD license

BSD licenses represent a family of permissive free software licenses. The original was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system after which the license is named. The original owners of BSD were the Regents of the University of California because BSD was first written at the University of California, Berkeley. The first version of the license was revised, and the resulting licenses are more properly called modified BSD licenses. Permissive licenses, sometimes with important differences pertaining to license compatibility, are referred to as "BSD-style licenses". Several BSD-like licenses, including the New BSD license, have been vetted by the Open Source Initiative as meeting their definition of open source.

The licenses have few restrictions compared to other free software licenses such as the GNU General Public License or even the default restrictions provided by copyright, putting it relatively closer to the public domain.

The BSD License allows proprietary use, and for the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary products. Works based on the material may be released under a proprietary license or as closed source software. This is the reason for widespread use of the BSD code in proprietary products, ranging from Juniper Networks routers to Mac OS X.

It is possible for something to be distributed with the BSD License and some other license to apply as well. This was in fact the case with very early versions of BSD itself, which included proprietary material from AT&T.

Apache License

The Apache License (Apache Software License previous to version 2.0) is a free-software license authored by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The Apache License (versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0) requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer, but it is not a copyleft license — it allows use of the source code for the development of proprietary software as well as free and open source software.

All software produced by the ASF or any of its projects or subjects is licensed according to the terms of the Apache License. Some non-ASF software is licensed using the Apache License as well: as of July 2009, over 5000 non-ASF projects located at SourceForge.net are available under the terms of the Apache License.

Licensing conditions

Like any free-software license, the Apache License allows the user of the software the freedom to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software.

The Apache License does not require modified versions of the software to be distributed using the same license nor even that it be distributed as free/open-source software. The Apache license only requires that a notice is kept informing recipients that Apache licensed code has been used. Thus, in contrast to copyleft licenses, recipients of modified versions of Apache licensed code do not necessarily also get the above freedoms. Or considering the situation from the Apache licensees perspective, they receive the freedom to use the code in any way they want, including using it in closed source products (cf Paragraph 4).

Two files that must be put at the top directory of redistributed software packages:

• LICENSE - a copy of the license itself.
• NOTICE - A "notice" text document listing the names of licensed libraries used, together with their developers.

In every licensed file, any original copyright or patent notices in redistributed code must be preserved, and in every licensed file changed a notification must be added stating that changes have been made to that file.

GPL compatibility

The Apache Software Foundation and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) agree that the Apache License 2.0 is a free software licence, compatible with version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). ^[5]

However, the Free Software Foundation considers all versions of the Apache License (as of 2007) to be incompatible with the previous GPL versions 1 and 2.

Open source software

Open source software (OSS) is defined as computer software for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the Open Source Definition or that is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of open source development and often compared to user-generated content. The term open source software originated as part of a marketing campaign for free software. A report by Standish Group states that adoption of open source software models has resulted in savings of about $60 billion per year to consumers.

The Open Source Definition, notably, presents an open source philosophy, and further defines the terms of usage, modification and redistribution of open source software. Software licenses grant rights to users which would otherwise be reserved by copyright law to the copyright holder. Several open source software licenses have qualified within the boundaries of the Open Source Definition. The most prominent and popular example is the GNU General Public License (GPL). While open source distribution presents a way to make the source codes of a product publicly accessible, the open source licenses allow the authors to fine tune such access.

The users are treated like co-developers and so they should have access to the source code of the software. Furthermore users are encouraged to submit additions to the software, code fixes for the software, bug reports, documentation etc. Having more co-developers increases the rate at which the software evolves. Linus's law states that, "Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow." This means that if many users view the source code they will eventually find all bugs and suggest how to fix them. Note that some users have advanced programming skills, and furthermore, each user's machine provides an additional testing environment. This new testing environment offers that ability to find and fix a new bug.

Open Source licenses grant licensees the right to copy, modify and redistribute source code (or content). These licenses may also impose obligations (e.g., modifications to the code that are distributed must be made available in source code form, an author attribution must be placed in a program/ documentation using that Open Source, etc.). Examples of free software license / open source licenses include Apache License, BSD license, GNU General Public License, GNU Lesser General Public License, MIT License, Eclipse Public License and Mozilla Public License.

Know about Open Source

The term “open source” software is used by some people to mean more or less the same category as free software. It is not exactly the same class of software: they accept some licenses that we consider too restrictive, and there are free software licenses they have not accepted. However, the differences in extension of the category are small: nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free.

– Free Software Foundation

Text of the Definition

Introduction

Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code.

The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:

1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

2. Source Code

The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

3. Derived Works

The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code

The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

7. Distribution of License

The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product

The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.

9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software

The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral

No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.

– Open Source Initiative