03 Jul, 2009
Greatest Software Challenges: Part One – Open Source
Posted by: Paul Vaartjes In: Technology| — Software
(This is part one of the Greatest Software Challenges series)
“Which two social and ethical issues pose the greatest challenge to Software Developers in the 21st Century?”
Part 1: Open Source Software
(This is part one of a four part series on the greatest challenges to software developers in the 21st Century. This article was written as a Software Design and Development Task in the Australian NSW HSC. All rights reserved. It answered the following question.
Part one will introduce and outline the background of the first issue, while part two will expand on the ethical and social issues it brings up. Part three and four will repeat this with the second topic)
Introduction
Open source is a relatively new trend in software development. It is, most simplistically, allowing free access to the source code of a program. However, in reality, it involves much more. Open source projects usually develop a community around them. This community acts as one giant peer review process, and means many people are constantly checking the project’s code, and constantly creating more features or plug-ins for the project. Read the rest of this entry »
