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Open Standards / Open Source
Rawley.org is built and run on totally
free, open source software, adhering to internationally
recognized, non-proprietary, vendor-neutral open standards.
Free, Open Source Software
"Open Source" and "Free" are oft abused terms in the software world. The
venerable FSF (Free Software Foundation)
prefers the term free
(as in free speech, not free beer), but open source (as
defined by the Open Source Intiative)
has become a much more widely used term.
Whichever term you prefer (I like saying "free, open source"), what we're
talking about here is software that is:
- free to run
- free to copy
- free to distribute
- free to study
- free to change
- free to improve
A necessary precondition of these freedoms is access to the source code,
hence the term "open source". So stuff you download for "free" (i.e. at no
cost) is not necessarily free software. Internet Explorer®, for
example, is most defintely not free, open source software.
The FSF, whose original mission was to produce
a free Unix-like operating system (see below), publishes
software under its GNU General
Public Licence (GPL),
commonly refered to as ``copyleft'', which guarantees the freedom of the
software for everybody. It kind of turns the typical proprietary
End User Licence Agreement (EULA) on its head. It's pretty cool, really.
GPL software is
unquestionably more reliable than it's proprietary counterparts (just ask any
programmer which compiler, source code version
control system or debugger they use-- if they are working in a heterogeneous
environment, odds are at least some of them are GPL software, whether
they know it or not). There are testimonials from rocket scientists, organ
transplant specialists, Hollywood special effects experts and others at the
FSF's GNU
Testimonials page.
In addition to FSF's GNU software, there are several notable packages covered by
the GPL. These include Larry Wall's powerful Perl programming language,
used extensively to drive interactivity on the Web, and Samba, software
which allows computers crippled by the Microsoft virus (just kidding!) to read
Unix network file systems. And there are many, many more incredibly useful
and powerful software packages that are completely free and open source.
The freedoms guaranteed by the GPL ensure that free software is not
improved only at the whim of corporate interests, but is continuously
improved and freely distributed by a global community of concerned users.
And there can be no single point of control of any piece of open
source software, so there can be no motivation to gain market control and
kill competing technologies (like Microsoft did). Open
Source software is developed soley for the benefit of its users.
Free, Open Source software is generally produced by not-for-profit organizations
that co-ordinate volunteer development of their products.
However, some commercial vendors have recognized the
power of the concept, and have begun to co-ordinate their own Open Source
projects, such as Netscape's Mozilla
Organization.
This stuff is ubiquitous. It is inconceivable that the internet would be what
it is today without it. Computing is where it is today in spite of
proprietary software vendors. Don't believe them when they take credit for
the so-called ``computer revolution''. The revolution has only just begun,
and it will be run on free software.
Open Standards
Open Standards are standards maintained by vendor neutral industry
or regulatory groups. They ensure that we do not become beholden to any
single vendor's proprietary
standards, allowing us to use our choice of compliant hardware and software to
interact
in the global computing community. They also ensure that documents created
with these standards will remain accessible indefinitely; with proprietary
standards, documents remain accessible only as long as the vendor sees fit to
support the standard.
There are many, many organizations maintaining vendor-neutral open standards
for all things technical. A few significant ones are the
Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI),
the British Standards Institution (BSi),
and W3C, the World Wide Web
Consortium (also see below).
The (totally free) guts of Rawley.org
Free tools used to build Rawley.org include: vim, a text editor, and CVS (Concurrent Versions System), a source
code version control system, and of course the GNU/Linux operating
system and all its attendant tools (ftp, bash, etc. etc.).
Rawley.org runs on the Apache Web
server on the GNU/Linux
operating system. Apache is the most popular Web server in the world, serving
67% of the active sites on the Web (Microsoft comes in a distant second with
only a 21% market share)*. GNU/Linux systems have a major share of the server
market.
Interactive and dynamic features are implemented on the
Common Gateway
Interface (CGI) standard, and driven by the Perl programming language and Bash, an interactive
shell and scripting language.
The Hyper Text Markup Language
(HTML) code that tells your Web browser to display the Rawley.org site is
written to validate on standards specified by W3c, the World Wide Web Consortium (also see below).
While Rawley.org is a non-commercial site, I like to plug the World Wide Web
Consortium, the GNU/Linux operating system, and the Campaign for a Non-Browser
Specific WWW at the bottom of each page.
*source:
site survey by Netcraft,
statistics for 11/2003
 The World Wide Web
Consortium
Clicking this logo on the bottom of any page will check the formatting code
on that page for standards compliance. (Clicking the logo here will take you
to the W3C home page.) This is a convenience for me to check my code, as well
as a way of promoting standards compliance to other Web authors.
This validator is a service of the World Wide
Web Consortium, the international body that defines standards for the Web.
Here is the W3C's self-description:
``The W3C was founded in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its
full potential by developing common protocols that promote
its evolution and ensure its interoperability. We are an international
industry consortium, jointly hosted by the Massachusetts
Institute of
Technology Laboratory for Computer Science [MIT/LCS] in the United
States; the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et
en Automatique [INRIA] in Europe; and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa
Campus in Japan....
``The Consortium is led by Tim Berners-Lee, Director
and creator of the
World Wide Web, and Jean-François Abramatic, Chairman.
W3C is funded by Member organizations, and is vendor neutral, working with
the global community to produce specifications and
reference software that is made freely available throughout the world.''
 The GNU/Linux
Operating System
GNU/Linux is a completely free, open source computer operating system (OS). It
is available via internet
download or can be purchased on CD (the
software is free, you just pay for the medium, packaging and manuals) from a
large variety of vendors, and is available for many different
hardware types (but especially Intel compatible x86). GNU is a project of
the Free Software Foundation (FSF), begun in
1984 to produce a completely free Unix-like OS. Linux is the
name of the OS kernel, originally written by Linus Torvalds. Most of the
tools and software in a ``Linux'' system are actually GNU
tools, so the term ``GNU/Linux'' is more appropriate when describing these systems. The GNU project is still working on their own
kernel, known as the GNU Hurd (I'm not
making this up).
GNU, by the way, stands for "Gnu's Not Unix".
 The
Campaign for a Non-Broswer Specific WWW
``Anyone who slaps a `this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web
page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had
very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another
word processor, or another network.''
-Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) in Technology Review, July 1996
The Big Two browser vendors have a history of extending the HTML standard in
ways that impede interoperability (HTML -- hyper-text marking language
-- is
the language that tells Web browsers how to display a document). This means
that Web programmers can do neat tricks on one browser, but have
to either ignore users of other browsers, or do something ugly in their code
to make it look similar on other browsers. This is why you see the ``Best
viewed with Browser X'' labels on sites.
This campaign exists to encourage Web designers and programmers to stick to
vendor-neutral standards in their Web production,
thus avoiding a future that mimics our past -- where computer users cannot view
content because they do not own the right brand of software or hardware.
Questions, comments, additions or corrections? Talk to me!
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