Free Open Source Survey in the Arab World

Since Handasa Arabia  is interested in supporting the Open Source hardware concept in the Arab world, it would like to distribute the Free Open Source Survey that was dveloped by

Arab League Educational ,Cultural and Scientific Organization

Directorate of Science and Research Programmes

More information about this project can be found at the Arab Open Source workshop Tunis 2005

You can complete the survey online in Arabic or you can download the survey file in English and send it to us at

admin AT handasarabia.org 

Introduction to Open Source

Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS) (also abbreviated as FLOSS or FOSS) has been spreading rapidly among all computer users. Briefly, OSS/FS programs are programs whose licenses give users the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the program (the source code of which is distributed also) , and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified program (without having to pay royalties to previous developers).

In the early days of computing (approximately 1945 to 1975), computer programs were often shared among developers. In its early days the operating system Unix, developed by AT&T researchers, was distributed as source code (with modification rights) for a nominal fee. However, as years progressed, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, software developers increasingly closed off their software source code from users. This included the Unix system itself.

Richard Stallman, a researcher at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, found this closing of software source code intolerable. In 1984 he started the GNU project to develop a complete Unix-like operating system which would be Free Software (free as in freedom, not as in free of charge).  In 1985, Stallman established the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to work to preserve, protect and promote Free Software.

The GNU project developed many important software programs, including the GNU C compiler (gcc) and the text editor emacs. A major legal innovation by Stallman was the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), a widely popular OSS/FS software license. However, the GNU project failed in its efforts to develop the “kernel” which is the core part of the operating system.

Meanwhile, the University of California at Berkeley had had a long relationship with AT&T’s Unix operating system and ended up rewriting many Unix components & key utilities from scratch. Eventually Berkeley efforts produced the capable Free/Open Source operating systems NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD, as a group called the “BSDs “, a proprietary variant of these is the Apple Mac OS X.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds began developing a small operating system kernel called “Linux”, primarily at first for learning about the Intel 80386 chip. Torvalds followed a whole new approach to software development, combining the sharing possibilities of OSS/FS with the speed of the Internet. He publicly released new versions of his kernel extremely often (sometimes more than once a day), allowing rapid feedback for further development.

When the Linux kernel was combined with the already-developed GNU operating system components and some components from other places (such as from the BSD systems), the resulting operating system was surprisingly stable and capable. Such systems were called GNU/Linux systems or simply Linux systems.

Note that there is a common misconception in the media: Linus Torvalds never developed the so-called “Linux operating system”. Torvalds was the lead developer of the Linux kernel, but the kernel is only one of many pieces of an operating system; most of the GNU/Linux operating system was developed by the GNU project and by other related projects.