The History and Idea of The Internet and Open Source

Lars Noodén
10:00 am - 11:15 am
22 March 2002
Rovaniemi, Finland

Definitions

A network is 2 or more interconnected computers.
An internet is a network of networks. e.g.:
- nsfnet
- fidonet
- bitnet
- telenet
- arpanet
- csnet
- etc.
The Internet is a network of networks communicating using tcp/ip.

The Internet's Background

1957 - U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)

1964 - Packet switched networks, no single outage point

1969 - ARPANET (1965 - 1969 planning & design)

1972 - ARPANET E-mail (1975 first mailing list)
1979 - USENET (1984 first moderated groups)
1982 - TCP/IP Adopted
1984 - Domain Name System (DNS)

1986 - NSFNET

1988 - Canada (CA), Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), France (FR), Iceland (IS), Norway (NO), Sweden (SE), United States (US)

1991 - WWW & Gopher

1993 - NCSA Mosaic
1995 - Netscape, Opera, Lynx

1995 - NSFNET back to research

Open Source

Academic research - 1950's+
GNU - 1984 (Free Software Foundation - 1985)
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Open Source - 1998
- Free Redistribution
- Source Code
- Derived Works
- Integrity of The Author's Source Code
- No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
- No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
- Distribution of License
- License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
- The License Must Not Restrict Other Software
- http://mirror.opensource.dk/docs/definition.html

Selected Examples

T_EX - typesetting language (esp. for mathematics) & LATEX & AMSTEX
(Note: The Internet is still designed to send regular text best and, thus, is best suited for use in the humanities. )
BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) - DNS tools
NCSA Mosaic --> Mozilla ( & Netscape, etc.) - first popular graphic web browser
Apache - world's most widely used web server
(Note: See netcraft web server survey. )
Perl & CPAN, PHP / Mason, GCC
(Note: CPAN is for Perl, there are many other archives out there. For example, see Savanna and Sourceforge.)
MySQL, Postgresql - relational databases
EMACS - highly flexible, extensible editor
Linux - UNIX-like operating system
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and others - UNIX-like operating systems.
(Note: These are known for long uptimes, i.e. secure and stable. )
Kerberos - authentication protocol
OpenLDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
sendmail, postfix, exim, qmail - mail transfer agents (aka mail servers)
(Note: All four are the best of breed. Sendmail is the most common of any MTA, commercial or regular.)

For more, see Freshmeat or recently released GNU software.

Development Models

Being able to read and change source code allows the possibility of finding and correcting problems quickly. Likewise, the same can be said for developing improvements.

Free (flexible and no cost) licenses reduce administrative overhead and reduce development time.

Talcoot

Being able to read and use source code increases productivity by reducing duplicate effort and duplicate errors.

Optimization	Input	Output
Progress	mh + mh + mh	3 mh
Economy	¹/₃mh + ¹/₃mh + ¹/₃mh	1 mh