Open-source applications

Social and political views have been affected by the growth of the concept of open source. Advocates in one field often support the expansion of open source in other fields. But Eric Raymond and other founders of the open-source movement have sometimes publicly argued against speculation about applications outside software, saying that strong arguments for software openness should not be weakened by overreaching into areas where the story may be less compelling. The broader impact of the open-source movement, and the extent of its role in the development of new information sharing procedures, remain to be seen.

The open-source movement has inspired increased transparency and liberty in biotechnology research, for example by open therapeutics and CAMBIA Even the research methodologies themselves can benefit from the application of open-source principles. It has also given rise to the rapidly-expanding open-source hardware movement.

Computer softwareedit

Open-source software is software which source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open-source code can evolve through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as large companies. Some of the individual programmers who start an open-source project may end up establishing companies offering products or services incorporating open-source programs.citation needed Examples of open-source software products are:

• Linux (that much of world's server parks are running)
• MediaWiki (that Wikipedia is based upon)
• Many more:
  • List of free and open-source software packages
  • List of formerly proprietary software

Electronicsedit

Open-source hardware is hardware which initial specification, usually in a software format, is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the hardware and source code without paying royalties or fees. Open-source hardware evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual hardware/software developers, hobbyists, as well as very large companies. Examples of open-source hardware initiatives are:

• Openmoko: a family of open-source mobile phones, including the hardware specification and the operating system.
• OpenRISC: an open-source microprocessor family, with architecture specification licensed under GNU GPL and implementation under LGPL.
• Sun Microsystems's OpenSPARC T1 Multicore processor. Sun has released it under GPL.
• Arduino, a microcontroller platform for hobbyists, artists and designers.
• GizmoSphere, an open-source development platform for the embedded design community; the site includes code downloads and hardware schematics along with free user guides, spec sheets and other documentation.
• Simputer, an open hardware handheld computer, designed in India for use in environments where computing devices such as personal computers are deemed inappropriate.
• LEON: A family of open-source microprocessors distributed in a library with peripheral IP cores, open SPARC V8 specification, implementation available under GNU GPL.
• Tinkerforge: A system of open-source stackable microcontroller building blocks. Allows control of motors and read out sensors with the programming languages C, C++, C#, Object Pascal, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby over a USB or Wifi connection on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. All of the hardware is licensed under CERN OHL (CERN Open Hardware License).
• Open Compute Project: designs for computer data center including power supply, Intel motherboard, AMD motherboard, chassis, racks, battery cabinet, and aspects of electrical and mechanical design.
• Lasersaur, an open-source laser cutter.

Food and beveragesedit

Some publishers of open-access journals have argued that data from food science and gastronomy studies should be freely available to aid reproducibility. A number of people have published creative commons licensed recipe books.

• Open-source colas – cola soft drinks, similar to Coca-Cola and Pepsi, whose recipe is open source and developed by volunteers. The taste is said to be comparable to that of the standard beverages. Most corporations producing beverages hold their formulas as closely guarded secrets.
• Free Beer (originally Vores Øl) – is an open-source beer created by students at the IT-University in Copenhagen together with Superflex, an artist collective, to illustrate how open-source concepts might be applied outside the digital world.
• In 2002, the beer company Brewtopia in Australia started an open-source brewery and invited the general population to be involved in the development and ownership of the brewery, and to vote on the development of every aspect of its beer, Blowfly, and its road to market. In return for their feedback and input, individuals received shares in the company, which is now publicly traded on a stock exchange in Australia. The company has always adhered to its open-source roots and is the only beer company in the world that allows the public to design, customise and develop its own beers online.

Digital contentedit

• Open-content projects organized by the Wikimedia Foundation – Sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary have embraced the open-content Creative Commons content licenses. These licenses were designed to adhere to principles similar to various open-source software development licenses. Many of these licenses ensure that content remains free for re-use, that source documents are made readily available to interested parties, and that changes to content are accepted easily back into the system. Important sites embracing open-source-like ideals are Project Gutenberg and Wikisource, both of which post many books on which the copyright has expired and are thus in the public domain, ensuring that anyone has free, unlimited access to that content.
• Open ICEcat is an open catalog for the IT, CE and Lighting sectors with product data-sheets based on Open Content License agreement. The digital content are distributed in XML and URL formats.
• Google Sketchup's 3D Warehouse is an open-source design community centered around the use of proprietary software that's free.
• The University of Waterloo Stratford Campus invites students every year to use its three-storey Christie MicroTiles wall as a digital canvas for their creative work.

Medicineedit

• Pharmaceuticals – There have been several proposals for open-source pharmaceutical development, which led to the establishment of the Tropical Disease Initiative and the Open Source Drug Discovery for Malaria Consortium.
• Genomics – The term "open-source genomics" refers to the combination of rapid release of sequence data (especially raw reads) and crowdsourced analyses from bioinformaticians around the world that characterised the analysis of the 2011 E. coli O104:H4 outbreak.
• OpenEMR – OpenEMR is an ONC-ATB Ambulatory EHR 2011-2012 certified electronic health records and medical practice management application. It features fully integrated electronic health, records, practice management, scheduling, electronic billing, and is the base for many EHR programs. http://www.open-emr.org/

Science and engineeringedit

• Research – The Science Commons was created as an alternative to the expensive legal costs of sharing and reusing scientific works in journals etc.
• Research – The Open Source Science Project was created to increase the ability for students to participate in the research process by providing them access to microfunding – which, in turn, offers non-researchers the opportunity to directly invest, and follow, cutting-edge scientific research. All data and methodology is subsequently published in an openly accessible manner under a Creative Commons fair use license.
• Research – The Open Solar Outdoors Test Field (OSOTF) is a grid-connected photovoltaic test system, which continuously monitors the output of a number of photovoltaic modules and correlates their performance to a long list of highly accurate meteorological readings. The OSOTF is organized under open-source principles – All data and analysis is to be made freely available to the entire photovoltaic community and the general public.
• Engineering – Hyperloop, a form of high-speed transport proposed by entrepreneur Elon Musk, which he describes as "an elevated, reduced-pressure tube that contains pressurized capsules driven within the tube by a number of linear electric motors".
• Construction – WikiHouse is an open-source project for designing and building houses.
• Energy research - The Open Energy Modelling Initiative promotes open-source models and open data in energy research and policy advice.

Roboticsedit

An open-source robot is a robot whose blueprints, schematics, or source code are released under an open-source model.

Transportedit

• Open Trip Planner – this code base is growing rapidly, with adoption in Portland, New York, The Netherlands and Helsinki.
• TravelSpirit – a greater level of 'super-architecture' ambition, to bring a range of open source projects together, in order to deliver 'Mobility as a Service'

Fashionedit

• Eyewear – In June 2013, an open-source eyewear brand, Botho, has started trading under the UK based Open Optics Ltd company.

Otheredit

• Open-source principles can be applied to technical areas such as digital communication protocols and data storage formats.
• Open-design – which involves applying open-source methodologies to the design of artifacts and systems in the physical world. It is very nascent but has huge potential.
• Open-source appropriate technology (OSAT) refers to technologies that are designed in the same fashion as free and open-source software. These technologies must be "appropriate technology" (AT) – meaning technology that is designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economic aspects of the community it is intended for. An example of this application is the use of open-source 3D printers like the RepRap to manufacture appropriate technology.
• Teaching – which involves applying the concepts of open source to instruction using a shared web space as a platform to improve upon learning, organizational, and management challenges. An example of an Open-source courseware is the Java Education & Development Initiative (JEDI). Other examples include Khan Academy and wikiversity. At the university level, the use of open-source-appropriate technology classroom projects has been shown to be successful in forging the connection between science/engineering and social benefit: This approach has the potential to use university students' access to resources and testing equipment in furthering the development of appropriate technology. Similarly OSAT has been used as a tool for improving service learning.
• There are few examples of business information (methodologies, advice, guidance, practices) using the open-source model, although this is another case where the potential is enormous. ITIL is close to open source. It uses the Cathedral model (no mechanism exists for user contribution) and the content must be bought for a fee that is small by business consulting standards (hundreds of British pounds). Various checklists are published by government, banks or accounting firms.
• An open-source group emerged in 2012 that is attempting to design a firearm that may be downloaded from the internet and "printed" on a 3D Printer. Calling itself Defense Distributed, the group wants to facilitate "a working plastic gun that could be downloaded and reproduced by anybody with a 3D printer".
• Agrecol, a German NGO has developed an open-source licence for seeds operating with copyleft and created OpenSourceSeeds as a respective service provider. Breeders that apply the license to their new invented material prevent it from the threat of privatisation and help to establish a commons-based breeding sector as an alternative to the commercial sector.
• Open Source Ecology, farm equipment and global village construction kit.