Diffference Between Open Source Systems Like Linux and closed ones like windows?

One Comment

1. ifilmu says:

   16. September 2009 at 05:15

   Open source software is computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets the Open Source Definition. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is 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.[

   Closed source projects ("CS") tend to collaborate either only to a limited or peripheral degree with third parties (other than project co-members), or under non-disclosure agreements. Corporate development is usually run by teams or structured groups, with workload, agendas, intended results, and deadlines, centrally agreed, and use paid developers to achieve these goals as required.

   Open source projects ("OS") by contrast can be voluntary for many of those involved, and who are doing it for fun (however, an increasingly large amount of open source code is written by paid programmers). New code is developed and reviewed in a less formal process by many people – in some cases hundreds of thousands, or millions – and since many of these are intimately familiar with the system concerned, the quality of review and final writing tends to be extremely high on such projects and the speed of development can be very fast[citation needed]. Collaborative work is also resource efficient, since duplication of effort is avoided.

   CS and OS projects tend to view their priorities as different. CS projects tend to work to deadlines, the date at which (for corporate, market or investor purposes) a new product or update must be released, or a new feature made available. OS projects, lacking investor pressure, tend to be more actively interested in how to do a job well, as well as produce it quickly, and in producing work to a high standard. However, feature creep is often prevalent in various smaller OS projects where the project fails to lock down milestones for releases which leads to frequent unpolished releases that are user unfriendly. This is not unique to OS projects, but as CS projects are driven by the market their releases do tend to be cleaner for the user (even if they end up slower and more messy under the hood).[citation needed]

   Example:

   Microsoft Windows is closed source, it is the most common operating system on personal computers and a de facto standard on these. Proponents would tend to agree that most versions of Windows has contained major changes to previous versions. Because it is developed by one company, it can be centrally managed and co-ordinated, and there are fewer "odd gaps" in its development as such. However against this, a huge effort has gone into protecting and preventing others from benefiting from this work in unintended ways, there has been much conflict over "hidden code" allegations, and security and quality have consistently been criticized by independent third parties over the years.