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From Reuse to Open Source
From Reuse to Open Source
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In the early days of Unix, components of the operating system, its libraries, and its associated utilities were passed around as source code; this openness was a vital part of the Unix culture. We described in Chapter�a> how, when this tradition was disrupted after 1984, Unix lost its initial momentum. We have also described how, a decade later, the rise of the GNU toolkit and Linux prompted a rediscovery of the value of open-source code.
Today, open-source code is again one of the most powerful tools in any Unix programmer's kit. Accordingly, though the explicit concept of “open source” and the most widely used open-source licenses are decades younger than Unix itself, it's important to understand both to do leading-edge development in today's Unix culture.
Open source relates to code reuse in much the way romantic love relates to sexual reproduction — it's possible to explain the former in terms of the latter, but to do so is to risk overlooking much of what makes the former interesting. Open source does not reduce to merely being a tactic for supporting reuse in software development. It is an emergent phenomenon, a social contract among developers and users that tries to secure several advantages related to transparency. As such, there are several different ways to approaching an understanding of it.
Our historical description earlier in this book chose one angle by focusing on causal and cultural relationships between Unix and open source. We'll discuss the institutions and tactics of open-source development in Chapter�/a>. In discussing the theory and practice of code reuse, it's useful to think of open source more specifically, as a direct response to the problems we dramatized in the tale of J. Random Newbie.
In the remainder of this chapter, we'll survey various issues associated with re-using open-source code: evaluation, documentation, and licensing. In Chapter�/a> we'll discuss the open-source development model more generally, and examine the conventions you should follow when you are releasing code for others to use.
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