OPEN SOURCE VS. CLOSED SOURCE CONTROVERSY: A NEED FOR NATIONAL POLICY INTERVENTION
Being
A SEMINAR PAPER PRESENTATED AT THE LLM CLASS 2012, FACULTY OF LAW, UNIVERSITY OF ILORIN
By
AKANGBE IBRAHIM
01/40IA/107
Course;
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LAW
Lecturer
DR. I. A. YUSUF
March, 2013
INTRODUCTION.
The term open source is widely applied to describe some software development methodologies that makes source code available to anyone without restriction[1]. Open source software development model is currently one of the most debated phenomena in the software industry. The emergency and rapid acceptance of the open source standards has generated a grave concerns regarding the reliability and integrity of the famous closed source software. Recently, the open source software is attracting a lot of attention not just in the computing and in the academic communities but, also in the political arena. These have generated a lot of controversy between the proponents of both open and closed source software. The paper firstly provide some background discuss of major key terms and trace the evolution of open source software development model. The paper also systematically examine the controversy surrounding the open and closed source. Lastly it puts forward various arguments by proponents of both open and closed source software for and against Government intervention in the software market.
What is Source Code?
Source Code: Source code is a text listing of commands to be compiled or assembled into an executable computer program. In computer science, source code is any collection of computer instructions written using some human-readable computer language, usually as text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source code. Source code has been considered to be a form of...