Open source software has now become the supporting technology of the entire internet era, and you probably can no longer do without the online world built on open source software. Below, let’s take a look at some of the most important open source technologies.
Linux, the operating system born for the internet. Linux is a free operating system, born in 1991. Users can obtain it for free through the internet or other means, and can modify its source code however they wish. It can run the major UNIX utility software, applications, and network protocols. It supports 32-bit and 64-bit hardware. Linux inherits Unix’s design philosophy of putting the network at its core, and is a stable, multi-user network operating system. This system was designed and implemented by thousands of programmers all over the world. Its purpose was to build a Unix-compatible product that is free from the copyright constraints of any commercial software and freely usable by the whole world. Linux can be said to be everywhere already: Android phones are developed on the basis of Linux, most of the world’s supercomputers also run Linux, and most data centers use Linux as their supporting operating system. Google, Baidu, Taobao and others all provide the internet services we use every day through Linux. Linux also plays an important role in aviation control systems.
OpenSSL, the security protocol that encrypts the internet. OpenSSL is an open source software library package that implements the SSL and TLS protocols. OpenSSL can be described as a cryptography-based secure development package that covers the main cryptographic algorithms, the commonly used key and certificate encapsulation and management functions, and the SSL protocol, and it also provides a rich set of applications for testing or other purposes. You could also say that OpenSSL is a security protocol that provides security and data integrity for network communication. SSL can provide confidential transmission on the Internet, so that communication between user and server applications cannot be eavesdropped on by attackers. OpenSSL is widely used by important websites such as online banking, online payment, e-commerce sites, portal sites, and email. Last year OpenSSL exposed a security vulnerability, and because its use is so widespread, the disclosure of that vulnerability made the entire internet tremble.
MySQL, the memory of the internet. MySQL is an open source, small database management system. Its original developer was the Swedish company MySQL AB, which was acquired by Sun in 2008. In 2009, Oracle acquired Sun, and MySQL became a product under Oracle. A great deal of information is stored in databases, and many engineers use the MySQL database when developing small projects. MySQL provides API interfaces for multiple programming languages such as C, C++, JAVA, and PHP. It also supports many systems including Windows, Mac, and Linux. This broad support has won it the favor of more developers; MySQL is one of the databases developers need to master. MySQL was originally developed for small applications, but today’s MySQL is no longer a small database. Basically every internet company uses this database system, and some financial transactions also use MySQL as their database engine. Through appropriate tuning, MySQL can both support large-scale access and guarantee data security, and it has become an important force threatening traditional commercial database systems.
Eclipse, the universal development tool. Eclipse is an open source, Java-based extensible development platform. Eclipse was originally created by the IDE product development groups of two companies, OTI and IBM, starting in April 1999. At present, led by IBM, a huge Eclipse alliance has grown up around the Eclipse project, with more than 150 software companies taking part in the Eclipse project, including Borland, Rational Software, Red Hat, and Sybase. In itself, it is only a framework and a set of services for building development environments out of plug-in components. Many Java programming tools are developed on the Eclipse platform, and many large companies, Oracle among them, have also joined the project one after another, declaring that Eclipse will in the future become the ultimate IDE capable of development in any language — users need only download plug-ins for the various languages. Eclipse is not a product that directly serves consumers; it is more like the all-purpose tool in a craftsman’s hands, with which developers can forge all kinds of creative services to meet end users’ needs.
Apache, the doorman of the internet. Apache HTTP Server (Apache for short) is an open source web server from the Apache Software Foundation. It can run on most computer operating systems, and because of its multiplatform nature and security it is widely used — it is also one of the most popular web server-side software packages, with a market share of around 60%. It is fast, reliable, and extensible through a simple API, and it can be used together with various interpreters, including PHP/Perl/Python and others. Apache is like a dutiful doorman, managing what data goes in and out of the server. Whenever you type http://XXX.com into your address bar, far away at the other end there is very likely a server running Apache, transmitting the information you need to your browser.
Hadoop, the heart of big data. Hadoop is a software framework capable of distributed processing of very large amounts of data, developed by the Apache Foundation. Users can develop distributed programs without understanding the low-level details of distribution. Hadoop has long helped solve all kinds of problems, including sorting extremely large datasets and searching large files. It is also the core of various search engines, such as Amazon’s A9 and the Able Grape vertical search engine used to find information about wine. Alibaba Group also has Hadoop applications in product recommendation, user behavior analysis, and credit calculation. Now that “big data” has become a trend, Hadoop has become one of the most important technologies. It is no exaggeration to say that without Hadoop, there would be no most big data applications. You could say that, for a programmer who doesn’t know Hadoop, you are already out of the loop.
WebKit, the internet’s “layout engine”. They say it is a browser kernel, but “layout engine” is actually a bit easier to understand. The information transmitted from the server to the browser is just a jumble of text. To see the beautiful web pages we normally see, the browser kernel needs to parse this text and “paint” the dry description into a beautiful browsing interface. WebKit is an open source browser engine; the engines corresponding to it are Gecko (the layout engine used by Mozilla Firefox and others) and Trident (also called MSHTML, the layout engine used by IE). According to StatCounter’s browser market share survey, in November 2012 WebKit’s market share exceeded 40%, making it the layout engine with the largest market share, surpassing the Trident engine used by Internet Explorer and the Gecko engine used by Firefox, and WebKit’s share is increasing year by year. At present almost all websites and online banking services have gradually come to support WebKit. WebKit kernels are also very widely used on phones — for example, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers are both developed on this framework. Summary Many people may not yet realize that the computers we use run open source software, our phones run open source software, the TVs at home run open source software, and even tiny digital products run open source software — especially internet server-side software, which is almost entirely open source. It is no exaggeration to say that open source software has penetrated every aspect of our daily lives. (The author of this article is 白鼠窝, WeChat public account: baishuwo)
