Scientific research miscellaneous | What kind of miracles has open source brought to us?

Not long ago, the first case of open source code infringement was pronounced in China, and the defendant was required to pay 500,000 yuan in damages because it did not follow the GPL3.0 open source license used by the plaintiff. Recently, there was another thing, there was a Polish sister who wanted to port a system to a UMIDIGI phone, but lacked a display screen driver, which is a branch of the Linux kernel and must be open source according to the GPLv2 protocol. But Yumi replied to the email and choked: "If you want to come to Shenzhen, take it!" Fortunately, the famous Youtuber Naomi helped go to Yumi to ask for the code, and Yumi then published the code on the official website and github.

It may be a bit confusing for people who are not familiar with open source protocols. Isn't it just a matter of using the open source code? How can it still infringe? And what is this GPL agreement? What does open source mean to society? In this article, we will talk about open source.

I believe that for those engaged in the Internet industry, the word open source is certainly not unfamiliar. In the early days of computer development, in the 50s and 60s, these various open source protocols did not exist. Because at that time, when a piece of hardware was sold, the software on it was bundled and included in the price, and providing the source code of the software was the default behavior in the industry. Basically, no manufacturer thinks that software is also a commodity, they only think that software is an accessory to the computer you buy. And most of the people who can use computers at this time are experts in related fields. Therefore, the software source code is a kind of knowledge for them, and it is a very reasonable thing for everyone to maintain and share together. With the development of computers, the software industry has gradually emerged, and the commercialization of software is inevitable. A large number of software companies were founded during this period.

However, at this time, the user habit still did not treat the software as a commodity, and if the computer enthusiasts at that time wanted to exchange computers, they would go to a community called "Home Computer Club" to exchange information. In the club, they dissected the software to modify the code, added the functionality of the software according to their own ideas, and then used a copy of the floppy disk to bring it back to their homes.

This situation continued until 1975, when a fledgling company, Microsoft, felt that something was wrong, when their first product, Basic programming software, was so popular that computers on the market were basically installed as long as they could install the software. Although the software sells well, there are more people who sell more copies, and obviously they can make a lot of money, but because of the private dissemination of the software, it is completely gone.

So Bill Gates, who was 20 years old at the time, wrote an open letter with a clear idea, openly discouraging those who share copy software as plagiarists, and telling everyone that no enthusiast can develop and maintain a piece of software for a long time without any income. As soon as the letter was sent, the software world boiled over. Large, medium, and small software companies have agreed. Closed-source software is the real way.

Going from open source to closed source is almost instantaneous, and this momentary change has also made those who advocate open source feel disgusted. Richard Matthew Stallman is particularly the best. At the time, he was doing experiments on artificial intelligence at MIT, and AT&T, the company that had originally developed Unix after the software was commercialized, began charging high licensing fees for Unix systems. At that time, this cost was about $200,000 to $200,000, and because a lot of the code was no longer open source, Stallman could not solve the problem by looking at the code or modifying the driver when the machine had problems.

For all of these reasons, Stallman hates the closed nature of software. As a result, Stallman resigned and went to the sea to pursue a career in free software. After going to sea, like Bill Gates, he published a GNU manifesto on the theme of recreating the spirit of solidarity in the software world, and after the declaration, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation to provide his personnel and financial support for his free software projects.

It was also during this period that he drafted the Gneeral Public License, the protocol mentioned at the beginning of the article. The main idea of this agreement is that you can use the source code of this license to modify, disseminate, and profit, but you must keep the original copyright information and disclose all the code you have modified. In other words, as long as your software uses GPL-covered code, your software must also be open source.

Programmers who hate closed-source software have chosen to join Stallman's team. Like the famous Linux is the use of the GPL protocol. On this basis, GPLv2, GPLv3, AGPL, LGPL and other protocols have been developed.

The problem, though, is that these protocols just look good, ostensibly remaining open source while allowing you to monetize the modified code. But in reality, the two are themselves relative.

There's a famous word called GPL contagion or GPL viruses, and as long as your project contains GPL code, the entire project becomes GPL. This makes it difficult to commercialize software based on the GPL protocol. Of course, there are exceptions, Linux-based Android avoids the infectivity of the GPL. The more relaxed Apache 2.0 protocol is used, allowing the phone to be developed on Android-based closed source. Google has used a very complicated way to package Linux at the kernel level, circumventing the infectivity of the GPL, otherwise other Android-based UIs will not develop at all.

But this matter is very controversial, and many people still believe that Android violates the GPL agreement. Other commercial companies are trying to avoid getting into GPL-covered code as much as possible. Therefore, Stallman's free software movement is only supported by people who have a great interest in open source. So what is there to do to keep open source and at the same time commercialize?

The problem did not come to fruition until 1998. Previously, the term Open-Source did not exist. Basically, the software of the time would use the word Free, which caused a misunderstanding among people at the time, free means free. So this year. A group of big guys from the Linux user group held a meeting, took inspiration from Netscape browser, felt that the word Free should be abandoned, and the word Open-Source was used to refer to open source software, and redefined that open source is open source, separate from subsequent use. That is to say, even if your code is open source, you can also use open source code as a closed distribution, in order to better develop open source rules, OSI (Open Source Initiative) organization has also been established, its main task is to evaluate open source licenses.

Since then, the open source community has split into two camps: the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Organization (OSI). These two camps represent two major open source ideas, the Free Software Foundation represents the absolute freedom of code, and the just-mentioned Apache 2.0 is a typical representative of open source organizations, these open source protocols are quite relaxed, in addition to requiring users to disclose the original author, can be closed source. Typical in addition to Apache 2.0 there is BSD, MIT protocol Google's AOSP and Chrome, Huawei's Open Harmony, are based on Apache 2.0. These loose open source protocols have developed strong commercial value, once Microsoft chose to close the source for commercial reasons, but now more and more companies also choose open source because of business.

In 2019, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology released the "Open Source Industry White Paper" to investigate a number of industries, and 86.7% of the domestic enterprises have applied open source technology, and 10.6% of the enterprises have planned to apply open source. The big tech companies are embracing open source, with Baidu having more than 700 open source projects, Alibaba having 1,200, and Google having more than 2,000.

Today, for those manufacturers, the code is not open source, it is not just a matter of whether the software is sold or not. Those manufacturers are more open source as a weapon to seize the commercial market and win word of mouth, using their own advantages of sufficient funds, fast research and development speed, and multiple traffic channels to preemptively release the source code that realizes a certain function. This method will attract many small companies that have no way to do research and development, develop products on the basis of the source code disclosed by large factories, and when more people use it, relying on this set of open source code will successfully establish their own commercial standards in a certain direction of a product and realize their monopoly in a certain aspect. Thus having absolute dominance in this direction. The most emblematic of this set of practices is Google's Android.

But now the companies that choose to open source the code have more or less their own careful thoughts, and it is impossible to return to the open source grandeur of the early days of computer development. In addition, with the gradual popularization and simplification of computers, and the birth of a large number of programs with different functions, modifying programs yourself has become a non-essential skill, so now that open source has been used in various ways, and even so many disadvantages, or all closed source. If this is the first thing that programmers don't agree to, the most important point of programming is not naming conventions, not adding comments, not readability, but not making wheels repeatedly, I can Ctrl+C Why do I have to play again?

To be honest, open source has really saved the jobs of many programmers. Today, the rich open source frameworks and open source libraries on the Internet can also allow programmers to complete a lot of functional logic that they would have to spend more time to complete in a short period of time. For example, the famous Opnecv, this set of BSD-licensed machine vision learning libraries, let many programming enthusiasts do the whole thing. Before a lot of face-changing videos, the software used to train these face-changing AI basically had the code used in this library. It is precisely because of open source, so you do not need to learn what is machine learning, what is computer vision, as long as you can call the interface, will be some C++ and Python and other basic code, you can make a face of their own software.

The current open source protocol has influenced the knowledge community from the software community, inspired the CC sharing license, and then triggered the OA journal movement in academia and promoted the sharing of knowledge. It is precisely on these that all mankind continues to move forward and create one miracle after another.

End -

With the rapid development of technology, Amu Laboratory will keep up with the pace of technology and constantly recommend the latest technology and hardware in the robot industry to everyone. Seeing our trainees make great strides in technology is the greatest value of our training. If you are in the robot industry, please pay attention to our public account, we will continue to publish the most valuable information and technology in the robot industry. Amu Lab is committed to cutting-edge IT technology education and intelligent equipment, making robot research and development more efficient!