Frequently Asked Questions

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. Also, many users in corporate settings hide their usage for political reasons.

Linux is believed to have somewhere between 4 and 27 million users, with best estimates towards the upper end of that range. (According to IDG, business Linux usage increased 212% in 1998. Other figures indicate it is roughly doubling yearly.)

The Netcraft web server survey tallies which web servers are used on the Internet. It consistently shows the open-source Apache web server to have over 50% and steadily increasing market share, beating out better-hyped proprietary products like Netscape's and Microsoft's server suites.

The Internet Operating System Counter collects data about operating system usage on the Internet in Europe. It consistently shows Linux is the most popular Internet-connected operating system there.

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.

Absolutely not! InfoWorld's 1997 "Best Product of the Year" roundup should have demolished this myth once and for all. Read the article to see their analysis, including this quote:

... readers who are using Linux in a business environment said they found the support they received to be far more impressive than what they were used to with commercial software.

Linux is not an exception. In fact, business users will generally find that mature open-source products are far more reliable to begin with, and that when support is needed it is dramatically cheaper and easier to get than from closed vendors.

This is exactly backwards, as any cryptographer will tell you. Security through obscurity just does not work.

The reason it doesn't work is that security-breakers are a lot more motivated and persistent than good guys (who have lots of other things to worry about). The bad guys will find the holes whether source is open or closed (for a perfect recent example of this see The Tao of Windows Buffer Overflow).

Closed sources do three bad things. One: they create a false sense of security. Two: they mean that the good guys will not find holes and fix them. Three: they make it harder to distribute trustworthy fixes when a hole is revealed.

In fact, open-source operating systems and applications are generally much more security-safe than their closed-source counterparts. When the "Ping o' Death" exploit was revealed in 1997 (for example) Linux had fix patches within hours. Closed-source OSs didn't plug the hole for months.

Alan Cox has written an excellent article on The Risks of Closed Source Computing.

LibLime does not have a position on whether ideas can be owned, whether patents are good or bad, or any of the related controversies. We think the economic self-interest arguments for open source are strong enough that nobody needs to go on any moral crusades about it.

Linux is an open-source operating system, and to date the most dramatically successful open-source platform. Linux is very popular in education, Internet service applications, software development shops, and (increasingly) in small businesses. Several successful companies market Linux and Linux applications.

Linux isn't the whole open-source story, however. There are many other open-source operating systems and applications available, including LibLime's entire product line.

The phrase "open source" standing by itself is a mass noun. In compounds that use the phrase as an adjectival noun, such as "open-source software," follow normal English usage and hyphenate.

While there is agreement on the broad term "open source" as meaning approximately what is captured in the Open Source Definition the term has, ironically, now become so popular that it has lost some of its precision. We strongly encourage everyone who cares about open software to use the term only to describe licenses that conform to the OSD, or software distributed under such licenses; but since the term has passed into more general use, we also encourage people to refer to the "OSI Certified" mark, which has precision and legal force in identifying software distributed under licenses that are known to meet the OSD requirements.

The one-sentence version:

Open source promotes software reliability and quality by supporting independent peer review and rapid evolution of source code.

The one-paragraph version:

Open source promotes software reliability and quality by supporting independent peer review and rapid evolution of source code. To be OSI certified, the software must be distributed under a license that guarantees the right to read, redistribute, modify, and use the software freely.

The above contents were adapted from the Open Source Initiative OSI FAQ located here and are licensed under the Open Software License 2.1 or Academic Free License 2.1.

Koha is free to download for any libraries who have an IT staff qualified to configure and maintain the system in-house.  It's useful to think of Koha as free as in "freedom", not free as in "beer".  There are always costs associated with managing an ILS.  With open-source software, you have the freedom to choose how you want to manage those costs (in-house or by contracting with a support provider like LibLime).  You also have the freedom to customize the product yourself, or by sponsoring development.  With proprietary software, you are not 'free' to do either of these things.