IT@NUS May 2009: Tapping the Potential of Open Source Software

Tapping the Potential of Open Source Software
— Ong Guan Sin

Open source software (OSS) refers to computer programs that are developed by their user community and made available to the public.

The philosophy of OSS was discussed as early as 1997 by open source evangelist Eric S. Raymond in his paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar>

Under the collaboration of hundreds or even thousands of programmers around the globe, OSS projects have been producing interesting software products, many of them becoming best-of-breed solutions in their class. Some notable examples include Firefox browser, various Linux OS variants, the popular web server software called Apache and the office productivity suite - OpenOffice.

In the business environment, the primary concern with using OSS is the lack of commercial entity ensuring viable support to the software. However, commercial support services are available for some OSS projects. And usually this gap is addressed by a large, albeit voluntary, self-support community.

Not only does OSS offer lower software cost, it also provides further software options on top of commercial ones, thus encourages innovation and enables quicker deployment. One recent interesting trend is the emergence of suites of OSS that works well as an integrated suite to offer even more value. An example is the so-called LAMP stack, consisting of Linux OS, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP/Perl/Python programming language (hence "LAMP"). This is currently dominating the web application space.

In an open academic environment like NUS, OSS can enhance our pursuit of learning and research, and enrich our experience and exposure to software technologies. Because of this, Computer Centre is embarking on an initiative to promote and facilitate adoption of OSS. It will initially start with a mirror site to carry as many open source software projects as possible. It will also aim to build an OSS community in NUS through online forum and self-support group.

Slated for public launch in Q3'09, we welcome any suggestions or requests related to open source software. Please email Guan Sin at .