Open Source Technology
The revolution in
software since the early nineties has been breathtaking.
In a recent issue of PC Format a comparison was done between Microsoft Office XP
(proprietary) and OpenOffice (open source). Office XP achieved a rating of 90%, while OpenOffice
achieved a rating of 87% (not bad for free software).
Why Open Source?
Open Source software is reliable, secure and free or relatively cheap.
What is Open Source?
The concept of “Open Source” promotes the benefits of collaborative development by ensuring
that potential end-users are able to obtain and use software, and that the software may be
improved and expanded to meet the needs of its users. Collaboration within the Open Source
community (developers and end-users) promotes a higher standard of quality, and helps to ensure
the long-term viability of both data and applications.
How many people are using open source software?
It's hard to know. Because a lot of it is spread via free downloads off the Internet, nobody has
anything like total sales figures.
However
Indirectly, everybody who sends email or uses the Web is using open source software all the time.
The running gears of the Internet (its mail transports, web servers, and FTP servers) are almost
all open source.
PHP
PHP is the web’s #1 Server-side Scripting Language. PHP, a recursive acronym for “
Hypertext Preprocessor”, is an open source server-side scripting language designed for
creating dynamic Web pages (e.g., such as e-commerce). As noted in a June 3, 2002
article, PHP recently surpassed
Microsoft’s ASP to become the most popular server-side Web scripting technology on the Internet,
and was used by over 24% of the sites on the Internet. Of the 37.6 million web sites surveyed
worldwide, PHP is running on over 9 million sites, and over the past two years PHP has averaged
a 6.5% monthly growth rate.
MySQL
The MySQL Database Server is very fast, reliable, and easy to use.
Its connectivity, speed, and security make MySQL Server highly suited for accessing databases
on the Internet.
Apache
Apache has 70% of the web server market, while Microsoft has 23% with the rest of the players
being insignificant.
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