Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla

HISTORY OF OSS:

*IBM , in the 1960s, came with some software which was free i.e. libre, an OSS.
*In late 1970s and early 1980s, two different groups were establishing the roots of the
 current open source software movement:
1.On the US East coast, Richard Stallman, formerly  a programmer at the MIT AI Lab,
resigned, and launched the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation.
2.On the US West coast, the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) of the University
of California at Berkeley was improving the Unix system, and building lots of applications
which quickly become BSD Unix.

Examples:
Apache (widely used as a WWW server),
Perl (an interpreted language with lots of libraries),
XFree86 (the most widely used X11 implementation for PC-based machines),
GNOME and KDE (both providing a consistent set of libraries and applications to present the
casual user with an easy to use and friendly desktop environment),
Mozilla (the free software project funded by Netscape to build a WWW browser).

Differences b/w OSS and other kind of devpt:

1.OSS systems are built by potentially large numbers (i.e., hundreds or even
thousands) of volunteers. It is worth noting, however, that currently a number
of OSS projects are supported by companies and some participants are not
volunteers.
2.Work is not assigned; people undertake the work they choose to undertake.
3.There is no explicit system-level design, or even detailed design [Vixie 1999].
4.There is no project plan, schedule, or list of deliverables.

Characteristics of OSS:
1.Developers never meet face to face,
2.Different geographic locations,
3.They cordinate via emails and bulliten boards,
4.Errors get rectified very quickly
5.Developers work on the part  they are passionate about.
6.Source code is available.
7.Open source developments typically have a central person
or body that selects some subset of the developed code for the “official” releases
and makes it widely available for distribution.

Study on Apache and Mozilla:

*Mozilla is a much bigger project of 78 modules , some of which are much larger than the
entire Apache project.

*Apache had about 6,000 MRs, 18,000 delta, and 220,000 lines of code added.

Comparision between mozilla and apache.