History of the Internet

Why does it not surpise me that the American Military funded the initial research into packet switching. Really goes to show how insecure they feel about themselves. They had to know and be able communicate information faster than anyone else. Luckly the nerds took over I suppose. Creating E-mail and bulletin boards early on in the exsistance of internet to make sure we didn’t end up with situation like in George Orwell’s book 1984. Think about it, if the internet wasn’t released to the public and developed into what it is today we could have ended up being watched and controlled by technology that we knew nothing about. Scary isn’t it?

So basically with the development of the Internet it created a new virtual society (cyberspace) which has it’s own individual issues. The internet also brings non-virtual social issues such as the suicide pact between two teenage girls that has recently been shown on Australian TV. It also brings up the issue of Anarchy, without any censorship on the Internet how can it be a productive and safe place to “live.”

(screen-shot from movie “Revenge of the Nerds” directed by Jeff Kanew

By Chris Larder

Open Source is the idea that software should be made available under a license which allow users to modify, share and distribute the software’s source code without restriction¹. However, the availability of a piece of software’s source code can be detrimental to the development of a dynamic/user-friendly computer program. Intellectual property (which is the source code as well as other parts of the program such as design and user-interface) is something that software companies spend copious amounts of money to protect and this is rightly so. The intellectual property of the product should be reserved and held by the creator of the software². If this fails then the software market will be flooded with incomplete and unstable software-packages.

The Open Source concept began with the creation of Linux and Wikipedia². Both were developed by volunteers across the globe who harnessed the power of the internet while it was still in its early stages. This collaboration of ideas spawned the belief that the success of a piece of software is relative to the number of people that have had input in its design. However, this is not the case at the present time. During the development of Linux and Wikipedia the internet was fairly new and the number of users was limited to people that had experience with computer programming. Now, with the invention of broadband and other high-speed connections, the number of people that have access to Open Source code is much larger. This leaves a lot of room for errors in the code to occur and result in unstable software. Adding to this, the invention of internet forums, where thousands of users contribute to the code, opens the door to online arguments which can often be very abusive and counter-productive to a product. Open Source radicals have also taken up a utopian view of Open Source by asking “How can we apply Open Source methods to the rest of the world⁵?” Saying that applying Open Source methods to the world will create a greater harmony and possibly perfect society in comparison to our current working democracy. This sort of philosophy removes Open Source from being a development process and draws an end-user of a product into a false sense of security regarding the choice of Open Source software over commercially developed software.

Another serious issue that comes with Open Source is security. This is because the risk for a rogue software engineer to insert malicious code (such as a Trojan horse) increases with the number of people working on the same project. Specific risks are numerous but one of the more predominant ones would be: when a software engineer inserts some malicious code into a piece of software which allows him exclusive access to the system that it runs on. This has the potential to damage a large organisation’s IT infrastructure and result in serious operational and financial losses. As well as this, having exclusive access to an organisation’s files could open them up to blackmail or even theft of intellectual property. But on a smaller scale, the unintentional lack of quality in the code could cause localised computer errors that would affect the performance of a particular computer system.

Copyright plays an important role in the Open Source debate with software companies relying on it to protect their assets. Open Source activists insist that they support copyright but they use it to strip any benefits from the creator by blurring the already unsteady line between ‘fair use’ and infringement⁶. This in turn, undermines the creator’s original intent³. These activists play to the fact that copyright only protects the particular way an author has expressed himself and does not extend to any ideas, systems, or factual information conveyed in the work⁶. Even with the constant progression of Federal and International Law the avenues for prosecution remain limited⁷. This is because of a number of reasons like geographical placement, international judicial systems and different interpretations of copyright law. Open Source developers use the fact that their product has been changed by so many people to abstain themselves of any responsibility when it come to theft of intellectual property.

It can be quite obviously seen that for the further development of software, the Open Source movement needs to remove itself from the mainstream. Although it has worked in the past, today’s dynamic digital community leaves no room for widespread collaboration of un-moderated code. This is due to the vast cultural attitudes and believes of developers that live all around the globe. There is no doubt that Open Source developers and software engineers are professionals and even experts in their given fields. But being able to easily misrepresent ones self on the internet and other digital realms should be deterrent enough not to trust Open Source projects. If Open Source continues to expand then we’ll see the decline of the software industry as we know it and possible damage in international economies.
REFERENCE LIST

1. Mulgan, Geoff & Steinberg, Tom with Salem, Omar (2005) Wide Open Demos United Kingdom

2. Golden, Bernard (2005) Succeeding with Open Source Pearson Education Boston

3. Healy, Tony (2004) Why Open Source is bad for Australia http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/soa/Why-open-source-is-bad-for-Australia/0,139023769,139151288,00.htm (accessed 7 May 2007)

4. Open Source is bad for business, says Microsoft ‘http://www.out-law.com/page-1612 (Accessed 5 May 2007)

5. Tsonis, Frank (2005) Open Source and Property Publisher Unknown

6. Copyright Office Fair Use Policy http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html  (accessed 9 May 2007)

7. Dixon, Rod (2003) Open Source Software Law Artec House USA

8. Chin, Pauline O (2001) Open Source Software Markets University of Florida USA

9. Saint-Andre, Peter (1998) Open Source Philosophy Publisher Unknown

10. Perens, Bruce (1999) The Open Source Definition in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution O’Reilly