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Monday, March 19, 2012

Open Source Software

Open source refers to a program or software in which the source code (the form of the program when a programmer writes a program in a particular programming language) is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design free of charge.

Open source code is typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes within the community.

The rationale for this movement is that a larger group of programmers not concerned with proprietary ownership or financial gain will produce a more useful and bug-free product for everyone to use. The concept relies on peer review to find and eliminate bugs in the program code, a process that commercially developed and packaged programs do not employ.

The basics behind the Open Source Initiative is that when programmers can read, redistribute and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. Open source sprouted in the technological community as a response to proprietary software owned by corporations.

Proprietary software is privately owned and controlled. In the computer industry, proprietary is considered the opposite of open. A proprietary design or technique is one that is owned by a company. It also implies that the company has not divulged specifications that would allow other companies to duplicate the product.

First Computer Virus


If you’ve been using computers every now and then, you definitely know about viruses, and if you’ve been reading my blog, then most likely you’ve seen a lot of my topics about computer virus, malware and worm. Whatever name they have, they only mean one thing –headache. Do you know that the first ever computer virus was born in 1971 and named the creeper virus? Creeper virus started on scientific and military network known as the ARPANET. Creeper virus was actually a self replicating program created by Bob Thomas that infected the DEC PDP-10 computers across the network. Nowadays, we consider this type of viruses as worm. This virus, upon replicating itself into machine that it accessed would broadcast “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” on the terminal screen. The reaper, which is the first virus removal program was the one who caught the creeper. The next virus was created 10 years after.