What's Open Source? Should I Care? Why?

If you've been reading or watching the news at all in the last six months, you have undoubtedly come across news stories about Edward Snowden and how he leaked classified documents to which he had access while working for the National Security Agency (NSA). Since that time, there people have taken a great interest in what the NSA does and how it does it. If the thought of complete strangers snooping into your business disturbs you, you are not alone, especially when espionage and shades of truth are the meat and potatoes of the particular branch of the U.S. government. It also means that open source software has become much more necessary for computer security.

Look at the titles of these articles:

• How the NSA collects millions of phone texts a day, Ars Technica, January 17, 2014
• 'The NSA Wasn't Forthcoming,' So A Computer Security Expert Briefed Congress Instead, The Huffington Post, January 16, 2014
• White House refuses to accept that NSA phone dragnet is illegal, Ars Technica, January 24, 2014
• NSA And GCHQ ‘Covertly Plant Vulnerabilities In Internet Encryption’, TechWeek europe, September 6, 2013
• Lavabit email service abruptly shut down citing government interference,  The Guardian, August 9, 2013

The repercussions of the activity of the NSA are many, but one of them is an international loss of trust with U.S. technology businesses. Microsoft, Apple, HP, and Cisco are all major players in the industry who have had to defend their reputations over insinuation that they were collaborating with the NSA in some way to provide security backdoors in their products. Customers from other countries suddenly have been showing less trust in these corporations because of the NSA's activities. In light of this, the Free Software movement could not be more important.

What is the Free Software movement? It is a philosophy of computing founded by Richard M. Stallman, a computer programmer and software freedom activist. Free Software is computer software which not only is free of charge, it also is free of traditional software restrictions. A typical license agreement for commercial software includes restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modification of the software. Free software does not prohibit such activities.

One foundational tenet of Free Software is public access to source code, the files used to create a piece of software. By providing the source code, it is possible to change a program. The term open source is often used interchangeably with Free Software, although there may be a shade of difference depending on whom you ask. There is debate within the Free Software community on whether it should be permissible to create a derivative product which does not provide equal access to its source code. The term open source means the source code can be obtained, but says nothing about the openness of derivative works.

Many users of open source software are regular people who do not concern themselves with much more than how to use a particular set of programs, but to say that open source code is unimportant would be terribly shortsighted. Developers and software companies have a different opinion: without source code there is no product. There are also other benefits. A project can have as much volunteer help as it can handle--a program's progress is not limited to paid employees. Bugs are more easily found and fixed with additional help. Most importantly, anyone can find changes to code which have less-than-noble intentions. It is not to say that a malicious developer could not introduce a backdoor, only that all code can be placed under public scrutiny. It's less likely that a person will do something he shouldn't if anyone can see exactly what he's doing.

The largest portion of software used today is at least partially proprietary, particularly Microsoft Windows and Office. Apple's OS X operating system and Google's Android phone software have an open foundation, but the most important bits are not. When someone uses proprietary software, he is dependent on the providing company for all fixes and updates. This is especially important for web browsers, which are an increasingly targeted avenue for hackers to use to compromise a system. The Linux operating system, based on the Free Software movement, is not limited in this way.

The next time that you sit down to your computer to get something done, give some thought to who made the programs you use. Ask yourself how much you trust the companies who created them. If the answer leaves some doubt, you may want to start looking into alternatives. At the end of this article is a link to a list of alternatives to major software for Windows which can be found for Linux Mint, a popular distributor of the Linux operating system.

Windows - Linux Mint Program Alternatives