Question

Open Source tools. What is the life-long learning lesson you think you can acquire from this type of assignment? Discuss ethical and global issues.

Answer 1

Hi, As this is very wide question so i try to map some of it and you are free to add any of your point.

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Open-source tools are software tools that are freely available without a commercial license. Many different kinds of open-source tools allow developers and others to do certain things in programming, maintaining technologies or other types of technology tasks.

OSI uses The Open Source Definition to determine whether it considers a software license open source. The definition was based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written and adapted primarily by Perens. Perens did not base his writing on the "four freedoms" from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which were only widely available later.

Under Perens' definition, open source is a broad software license that makes source code available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent restrictions on the use and modification of the code. It is an explicit "feature" of open source that it puts very few restrictions on the use or distribution by any organization or user, in order to enable the rapid evolution of the software.

People prefer open source software to proprietary software for a number of reasons, including:

Control. Many people prefer open source software because they have more control over that kind of software. They can examine the code to make sure it's not doing anything they don't want it to do, and they can change parts of it they don't like. Users who aren't programmers also benefit from open source software, because they can use this software for any purpose they wish—not merely the way someone else thinks they should.

Training. Other people like open source software because it helps them become better programmers. Because open source code is publicly accessible, students can easily study it as they learn to make better software. Students can also share their work with others, inviting comment and critique, as they develop their skills. When people discover mistakes in programs' source code, they can share those mistakes with others to help them avoid making those same mistakes themselves.

Security. Some people prefer open source software because they consider it more secure and stable than proprietary software. Because anyone can view and modify open source software, someone might spot and correct errors or omissions that a program's original authors might have missed. And because so many programmers can work on a piece of open source software without asking for permission from original authors, they can fix, update, and upgrade open source software more quickly than they can proprietary software.

Stability. Many users prefer open source software to proprietary software for important, long-term projects. Because programmers publicly distribute the source code for open source software, users relying on that software for critical tasks can be sure their tools won't disappear or fall into disrepair if their original creators stop working on them. Additionally, open source software tends to both incorporate and operate according to open standards.

Community. Open source software often inspires a community of users and developers to form around it. That's not unique to open source; many popular applications are the subject of meetups and user groups. But in the case of open source, the community isn't just a fanbase that buys in (emotionally or financially) to an elite user group; it's the people who produce, test, use, promote, and ultimately affect the software they love.

Doesn't "open source" just mean something is free of charge?

No. This is a common misconception about what "open source" implies, and the concept's implications are not only economic.

Open source software programmers can charge money for the open source software they create or to which they contribute. But in some cases, because an open source license might require them to release their source code when they sell software to others, some programmers find that charging users money for software services and support (rather than for the software itself) is more lucrative. This way, their software remains free of charge, and they make money helping others install, use, and troubleshoot it.

While some open source software may be free of charge, skill in programming and troubleshooting open source software can be quite valuable. Many employers specifically seek to hire programmers with experience working on open source software.

Advantages:

Overall, the key advantages stem from the ability of open source software to drive “agility” such as customization, time to market, and experimentation.

Customization: With open source, service providers are able to customize their software to their needs, and the market's needs. This customization also helps companies to differentiate themselves from competitors.

Time-to-Market: In the time-to-market area, it’s possible to modify the source code immediately without having to engage with the proprietary vendor. New releases that used to take months can now be done in weeks or days.

Experimentation: Open source is ideal for experimentation because it’s customizable, source code changes take effect immediately, and it’s at the best price (free).

Disadvantages:

Customization Can Jeopardize Support: However, the ability to modify the source code leads to one of the key disadvantages as well, which is that you need to have dedicated people to support the code. It’s your responsibility especially if you have modified it, which means you might end up spending more money than you initially planned.

Level of Support: Unlike proprietary software, most open source initiatives do not come with any structured support. They often even rely on contacting the developer directly.

Intellectual Property Concerns: Many people also expressed intellectual property concerns. It can be difficult to and expensive to ensure full compliance with all of the different open source licensing terms, and that can lead to litigation. Although, that is not an issue unknown in the telecom world.

For the full details on all of the advantages and disadvantages listed, and telecom operators’ attitudes toward Open Source, request the full report by clicking the button below.

Why make software open source?

Technology is continually evolving, updating and adapting to better fit our daily needs. Google’s innovative artificial intelligence engine, Tensorflow, is the technology behind its cutting-edge tools which recognise spoken words and search photos. Why, then, did Google make Tensorflow open source in 2015?

The simple answer is that more heads together equals more progress. They hoped that by opening up the table to other developers, they could create software better suited to their needs. More than 1,300 external developers have now worked on TensorFlow. This collaboration has meant that it’s now one of the standard frameworks used to develop AI applications, which will help Google’s own cloud-hosted AI services, thus completing the circle. By putting the code out in the open, Google has ensured that they can profit from better software which will continue to evolve.

Opening the software up to the public also provides good promotion. When Google released its TensorFlow, it sparked significant interest in the software, now used by the likes of Dropbox and Airbnb. All in all, contributing to open source software has mutual benefits for all the parties involved, making sure nobody misses out on the latest improvements.

The critical thing to remember is that each company manipulates the source code for their own uses. The idea isn’t to replicate and privatise the same design but to share base knowledge to create different solutions for differing purposes, at the same time benefitting from the experience, expertise and improvements made by others. The open-source development model encourages open collaboration, driven by peer production, benefitting millions of users worldwide

Ethical Issues:

When developers contribute, collaborate, or obtain open-source code, they look at how the code will help bolster their other projects as well as ensure they are complying with any open-source licenses. One thing that doesn’t get enough attention is the ethics of that open-source project, according to Heikki Nousiainen, CTO and co-founder at Aiven, an IT service management company.

“Some of the ethical considerations one needs to take when using open-source code are checking for bias or exclusion, accuracy, crediting your collaborators and sharing code or finished projects in return,” he said.

RELATED CONTENT:
The realities of running an open-source community

Over the summer, Facebook’s open-source JavaScript library React was under fire after racism and harassment were discovered within its community. The incident is known as #Reactgate and it ended with the designer Tatiana Mac, who raised awareness of some of the issues, resigning from the industry, and React software engineer Dan Abramov and library author Ken Wheeler deactivating their Twitter accounts temporarily.

According to reports, the drama unfolded after a talk Mac gave at Clarity Conf about the broader impacts designing systems can have and how to design in a more ethical and inclusive way. After the talk, users commented that she was talking at a social justice conference, not a tech conference, and another user tweeted that React developers were into weights, Trump and guns — things spiraled from there.

“People care more about protecting the reputation of a **framework** than listening to **multiply marginalised** people that you have actual **white supremacists** in your niche community and our broader community,” Mac tweeted in response to the backlash.

Abramov deactivated his account, stating “Hey all. I’m fine, and I plan to be back soon. This isn’t a ‘shut a door in your face’ kind of situation. The real answer is that I’ve bit off more social media than I can chew. I’ve been feeling anxious for the past few days and I need a clean break from checking it every ten minutes. Deactivating is a barrier to logging in that I needed. I plan to be back soon.” When he returned to Twitter, he said deactivating his account was “desperate and petty.”

Wheeler also returned to Twitter, stating, “Moving forward, I will be working to do better. To educate myself. To lift up minoritized folks. And to be a better member of the community. And if you are out there attacking and harassing people, you are not on my side.”

As a result, Facebook has adopted a new code of conduct and vowed to combat online harassment. The code of conduct states: “In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to make participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.”

According to Nousiainen, other ethical issues in the open-source community include using code for profitable reasons without contributing in return. “But this is true in any online group, unfortunately, and I think the issues are limited considering the size of the open-source movement. However, businesses and developers should always be ensuring that they’re following the code of conduct for the community and playing fair,” he said.

In order to ensure an open-source project promotes innovation while balancing ethics, Nousiainen explained that ethics should be ingrained into projects and initiatives from the beginning. “By understanding the open-source community’s code of conduct and implementing best ethical practices throughout the entire project, ethical considerations won’t be compromised in the name of innovation. In this way, the hope is that breaches of conduct or unethical acts are not suddenly revealed later down the line, but prevented beforehand.”

“Our role is to empower maintainers to grow healthy and welcoming communities around their open-source projects. The goal isn’t just to prevent or reduce the visibility of disruptive behavior (blocking users, hiding content, etc.), but to actively encourage maintainers to adopt inclusive behaviors, even if they don’t have previous community management expertise,” added Ben Balter, senior product manager of community and safety at GitHub. “We want to encourage users to be good ‘online citizens,’ and can do that by either adding friction to disruptive behavior or reducing friction for inclusive behavior, with friction being how easy or hard it is to do something on the platform.”

Ethical issues in businesses

Discrimination in the Workplace

Every business needs to be aware of anti-discrimination laws and regulations. A business owner doesn't need to receive a complaint from an employee or customer to be fined for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. In what are called "drive-by lawsuits," businesses are targeted for potential lawsuits by people who drive or walk by a business and note the violation, according to 60 Minutes.

Violations might include not having doors with appropriate widths, the lack of handicap accessibility, or failure to provide handicap parking. People who file the complaints don't need to be handicapped to receive settlements of $4,000 per violation.

Unsafe Working Conditions

Employees have a right to safe working conditions based on regulations outlined in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). While many OSHA citation violations deal with fall hazards, respiratory protection and chemical exposure, there have been lawsuits regarding the safety of inane items such as the signs that twirl at street corners for marketing, according to Posterhead.

The violations stemmed from the sharp points of the signs and unprotected edges, which created lacerations. Businesses have restricted what twirlers can do with signs and provided safety features for signs. Many companies moved away from twirlers entirely to avoid these ethical problems in business.

Whistleblowing or Social Media Rants

Business owners must respect and not penalize employees who are deemed whistleblowers to either regulatory authorities or on social media. Essentially, employees are encouraged and cannot be penalized for raising awareness of workplace violations.

A Yelp employee wrote an opinion piece on a blog website that described the poor working conditions at Yelp. The employee was fired for her negative views on the company. However, states are increasingly passing off-duty conduct laws to protect employees for stating opinions on social media when they are not at work.

Ethics in Accounting Practices

A business must maintain accurate bookkeeping practices. Luckin Coffee, for example, which inflated sales and ended up with a $300 million fraud on its accounting books, according to TechCrunch. Nasdaq ultimately delisted the startup company as a result.

Even small privately held companies must keep accurate financial records to pay appropriate taxes and employee profit sharing or to attract business partners and investments.

Global Issues

It’s precisely this ability of open source code to be reproducible infinitely and at no cost which puts the system at risk. Without revenue, there is no maintenance, and without maintenance, the commons becomes toxic very quickly. Why is that? Because the ecosystem changes at a rapid pace. As new paradigms are invented, reliance on older open source assets becomes a liability that prevents you from adapting quickly to changes in your business. As new security issues are discovered, open source code that isn’t updated becomes a security risk.

In other words, precisely because there’s a big pool of code that costs nothing to reproduce, the removal of people to actively maintain it creates all sorts of issues. In Langel’s words, “the commons deteriorates instead of flourishes at the lack of human intervention.”

There are many reasons open source contributors might find it hard to justify contributing to a project. Remember the “f-word” I used above? (Fun.) Communities can become toxic cesspools, warding off would-be contributors. Or they can be welcoming to newbies. As Red Hat’s Lili Cosic detailed, the Kubernetes community has heavily invested in tools and policies that make it a positive experience for contributors. “In the long run [the Kubernetes approach] will create more diversity in the kinds of contributors you can have,” she said.

It’s more than money

Ultimately, this feels like an even bigger issue than money, yet money does play a part. Developers need to be able to pay the rent, just like anyone else. This is one reason that Drupal and Acquia founder Dries Buytaert has been correct to point out that open source really is a matter of privilege: A relatively small percentage of people can afford to contribute in their “free” time. Free time isn’t free.

Even those developers who are getting paid to contribute are constantly evaluating different options for where to spend their open source time. As Aimee Maree points out, “With all the money [in open source] we should not be expecting free work…. The current issues are and have been more around how we maintain contributors and why would new people want to join [a particular community] when it’s a day job.” Some developers will put up with garbage behavior in their company, but only until they can find something better. In open source, there’s even less reason to put up with abuse because they’re not employees, they’re contributors.

Some Global issues:

1. McHardy, the Linux system copyright troll in Germany, adopts a new strategy

Patrick McHardy, an early contributor to Linux, has been using the threat of litigation in Germany to obtain monetary settlements, essentially acting like a copyright troll. He has been active for seven and half years and is believed to have approached over 80 companies. This number is difficult to estimate because many companies have settled without a court action and, in any cases, German court proceedings are confidential. The judges of the appellate court in the Geniatech case suggested that they had significant concerns with his standing to bring the copyright claims for violation of GPLv2, and McHardy withdraw the case.

McHardy has avoided further court cases but has continued to assert compliance violations of GPLv2. Early in 2019, he shifted from his prior strategy of “settling” cases with an agreement with a contractual penalty (and then enforcing that penalty) to a new strategy of only seeking reimbursement of his time for analysis (but charging a premium for his time). Under the prior strategy, these contractual penalties could be quite significant. More recently, he has started, once again, to demand contractual penalties.

2. Richard Stallman leaves GNU, MIT and the Free Software Foundation due to statements about Jeffrey Epstein victims

Richard Stallman resigned as president and board member of the Free Software Foundation. The free software (and open source) movement owe much to Richard Stallman for his vision and persistence. However, over the years, he has made a number of comments about matters outside the FOSS movement that have made him increasingly controversial. His statements this year about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims resulted in pressure for his resignation from the Free Software Foundation.

He also resigned from MIT, and the maintainers of the GNU operating system ejected him. After praising his contributions, they noted: “Yet, we must also acknowledge that Stallman’s behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to.” It is not clear who will take over his leadership role of the free software movement.

3. The trade war comes to OSS

In May of this year, the Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), placed Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and 68 non-U.S. affiliates on the Entity List. In August 2019, BIS added 46 additional non-U.S. Huawei affiliates to the Entity List. Companies may not export, re-export or transfer any items subject to Export Administration Regulations (the “EAR”) to Huawei except in the four areas (reduced to three in August 2019) in which BIS has issued a Temporary General License, or if BIS grants a specific license.

Google immediately cut off access to its Android operating system (but was able to provide some updates under an exception from BIS) as well as Google services, such as Google Play Store. Huawei had to revert to the use of the Android Open Source Project. BIS has extended the Temporary General License several times. Huawei announced that it had been working on an alternative version of Android and would ship it with the next version of its phones. Since it seems likely that this suspension of Huawei’s access to Google’s Android operating system will be permanent, it is possible that the Android ecosystem will split into two ecosystems: one based in the U.S. and the other based in China.

4. Ethical restrictions in OSS licenses

OSS has been subject to several attempts to condition use of OSS for ethical reasons. This year, we had a number of examples of “ethical licenses.” For example, Seth Vargo, a developer, pulled his open source library project, Chef Sugar, from its repository, which made it unavailable to Chef licensees. He pulled Chef Sugar because it was being used as part of a Chef contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the ICE contract was initially signed in 2014).

Initially, Chef claimed that it owned the copyright in the Chef Sugar project, but that issue was not resolved. Although the Chef CEO responded that the company would continue providing services to ICE, four days later the CEO announced that Chef would not renew the license with ICE and would donate the revenues from the ICE contracts to charities dealing with family separation.

The activist Coraline Ada Ehmke has created the Hippocratic License; she states that the license “add[s] ethics to open source projects.” The Hippocratic License adds the following provision to the MIT License: “The software may not be used by anyone for systems or activities that actively and knowingly endanger, harm, or otherwise threaten the physical, mental, economic, or general well-being of other individuals or groups, in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The OSI quickly noted that the Hippocratic License is not an “open source” license. Unfortunately, the additional provision makes it quite difficult to interpret the license.

5. FOSS strategy in blockchain projects

As we noted last year, many blockchain projects are licensed under FOSS licenses. The blockchain community have made some complex and unusual choices for infrastructure technologies. This year the Algorand blockchain project, a new blockchain, announced that SDKs, example applications and helper libraries were licensed under the MIT License. However, the Algorand node software is licensed under AGPLv3. Many companies’ legal or compliance departments restrict them from using software under the AGPLv3 because of the difficulty of ensuring compliance, which may jeopardize the adoption of the Algorand project by enterprises.

6. Oracle v. Google redux yet again

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) published its second decision in the ongoing case of Oracle against Google, ruling that Google’s unauthorized use of 37 packages of Oracle’s Java application programming interface (API) in its Android operating system infringed Oracle’s copyrights. The CAFC overturned the first district court decision to find that the APIs were copyrightable and returned the case to the district court for a decision upon the fair use defense. Once again the district court found against Oracle on the basis that Google’s use of the APIs was fair use. Oracle appealed. The CAFC, once again, overturned the district court decision, finding that Google’s use of the APIs was not fair use as a matter of law. The Supreme Court granted certiorari. This case will be very important in determining the scope of copyright protection for computer software.