Open-Source Software
Distribution and Development

Glossary

This glossary features acronyms and terms that arise in the context of open-source development and distribution.  The open-source community operates inside of a specialized language that is a large part of the open-source toolcraft.  Some of the terms are shared with the community of Unix practitioners, especially those around the various GNU Projects.

Some open-source efforts have specific relationships to closed-source and proprietary software and also to standardized interfaces and open specifications that have proprietary implementations.   We identify some of those elements because they figure in how open-source projects interact with projects having different development and distribution models.

Last Updated 2002-09-03-19:43 -0700 (pdt)

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Apache

The name of the open-source HTTP Web Server project.   Apache servers are currently more common than all other Web Servers combined.   Verify with http://www.netcraft.com/survey/

CLI

Call-Level Interface.  Usually in reference to the standard interface defined for making requests from programs to SQL-based database management systems.   ODBC offers a superset of the standard CLI.

COM

Microsoft Component Object Model.

committer

[Apache]

copyleft

Term used for the copyright agreement and license statement created by Richard Stallman for software developed under the GNU project.  Recipients of software under this license are entitled to receive and use the source code of the software to which the license applies.  In addition, recipients are permitted to redistribute the licensed software and to make derivative works provided that the source code of the derivative is also made available under similar conditions.  The current version of "copyleft" is the GNU Public License.

CVS

Concurrent Versions System.  Part of the open-source toolcraft, CVS is used for collaborative software configuration management on the Internet.  Developers favor CVS for making current work available and also for bringing together and managing configurations using configurations developed at different locations around the world.

developer

[Apache]

DBMS

Data Base Management System.

Debian

?? http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines

FreeBSD

Free Berkeley

FSF

Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985 by Richard Stallman.  The key effort of the FSF has been the GNU Project, initiated in 1984.

GNOME

The GNU Network Object Model Environment Project.

GNU

GNU is Not Unix.  The premier open-source development project, carried out by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. 

GPL

GNU Public License.

GTK

Graphic Tool Kit.

GUI

Graphical User Interface

KDE

An open-source desktop interface project that depended on a proprietary library (Qt) and thus was not acceptable to the GNU Project.

iODBC

Independent ODBC.  See http://www.openlinksw.com/iodbc/

Jakarta

Project to create an open-source java-based server.  Tomcat is the name of the basic open-source reference implementation.

KDE

?

lazy consensus

? [used by Apache and Jakarta]

LGPL

Lesser GNU Public License.

Linux

?

MySQL

My SQL Database?

ODBC

Open Data Base Connectivity.  Usually refers to the Microsoft ODBC interface.   This interface provides a means for interoperable access to a variety of database systems in a DBMS-independent way, and it supports the Standard CLI.

OLE DB

Object-Linking-and-Embedding Data Base.  "A set of Component Object Model (COM) interfaces that provide applications with uniform access to data stored in diverse information sources and that also provide the ability to implement additional database services. [OLEDB20: p.5]

OSD

Open Source Definition.  See http://www.opensource.org/osd.html.

OSI

1. Open Source Initiative.  A marketing program for free software.  See http://www.opensource.org/.
2. Open Systems Interconnectivity.  Designation for an interconnectivity model and a suite of programs produced under the auspices of the International Standards Organization.

OSI Certified.

Having an open-source license that is certified to conform to the Open Source Definition.

OSS

Open-Source Software.

Perl

Perl?  See http://www.perl.com/.

PHP

? An HTML-embedded scripting language that provides access to databases on Web servers, using standard ODBC.  See http://www.php.net/

Python

Python?

Qt

Originally a proprietary library on which KDE depended.  There is now an open-source version and a closed-source Pro version.

SQL

Structured Query Language

Tcl

?

unixODBC

Unix ODBC. See http://www.unixodbc.org/.   Also, http://users.ids.net/~bjepson/FreeODBC/.

user

[Apache]

WOSA

Windows Open Services Architecture.

Zope

?