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Open Source and Trial Software - Documentation for Teaching

Computer Education Techniques downloads and analyzes open source and proprietary trial software available in the public domain.

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The migration of software workloads to the cloud has changed the utilization of open source software. Public clouds currently dominate the space and some leading vendors treat open source communities and businesses as free research and development for their own proprietary services. Although there are differences in opinion regarding the adherence to the principles of open source software, it is clear that open source software is in danger of being taken over by companies that do not share the values of the communities in when they participate in.¹ The Common Clause initiative adds restrictions that limit or prevent the selling of open source software. However, this license has not been widely accepted from the open source community. The SSPL: Server Side Public License is designed to protect open source software against expensive litigation and other issues relating to monetizing code ip: intellectual property. SSPL is being reviewed and evaluated to become an Open Source Initiative-approved license.

A long term strategy is to develop a framework for an independent rating system for assessing the quality of the documentation of the leading open source licenses: Apache License 2.0/Apache 1.1, MIT License, BSD3-clause new or Revised License/BSD-2 clause simplified, Common Development and Distribution License 1.0, Eclipse Public License 1.0, GNU General Public Licenses v3.0/v2.0, GNU General Lesser Public License 2.1, Ms-PL: Microsoft Public License, and Mozilla Public License 1.1.

According to the 2018 Black Duck by Synopsys Open Source Security and Risk Analysis, 96 percent of the 1,100 commercial applications that the company audited for the survey contained open source components.  An application contained on average of 257 open source components with 57 percent of an applications’ code being open source. ²

New York State Department of Education Regulations and Standards

There is a challenge to address those areas of information technology where there is a scarcity of industry standard textbooks: 1- Update and extend textbooks with source software documentation into industry- and client- specific training resources. 2- Develop documentation for open source software. 3- Identify emerging use of hybrid commercial and open source software.

CETi continues to develop and expand its knowledge base for developing academic standard lesson plans and outlines for teaching: IT textbook extensions, white papers, and open source documentation repositories. The objective is to provide client organizations with streamlined learning paths which provide a progression to source open source software certification. Client organizations review the code - work performed, academic credentials, and certifications of the CETi instructor.

Footnote 1:
www.sdtimes.com, Feburary 2019, Chris Lamb, project leader of the Debian project.

Footnote 2:
www.sdtimes.com, November 2018, New Software Licenses Aim to Protect Against Cloud Providers.