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Figure 4-10 Software Sources and Types

Because of the risk and expense, custom development is the last-choice alternative, used only when there is no other option. Figure 4-10 summarizes software sources and types.

What Is Firmware?

Firmware is computer software that is installed into devices such as printers, print servers, and various types of communication devices. The software is coded just like other software, but it is installed into special, read-only memory of the printer or other device. In this way, the program becomes part of the device’s memory; it is as if the program’s logic is designed into the device’s circuitry. Therefore, users do not need to load firmware into the device’s memory.

Firmware can be changed or upgraded, but this is normally a task for IS professionals. The task is easy, but it requires knowledge of special programs and techniques that most business users choose not to learn.

Q3 Is open source software a viable alternative? To answer this question, you first need to know something about the open source movement and process. Most computer historians would agree that Richard Matthew Stallman is the father of the movement. In 1983, he developed a set of tools called GNU (a self-referential acronym meaning GNU Not Unix) for creating a free Unix-like operating system. Stallman made many other contributions to open source, including the GNU general public license (GPL) agreement, one of the standard license agreements for open source software. Stallman was unable to attract enough developers to finish the free Unix system, but continued making other contributions to the open source movement.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, working in Helsinki, began work on another version of Unix, using some of Stallman’s tools. That version eventually became Linux, the high-quality and very popular operating system discussed previously.

The Internet proved to be a great asset for open source, and many open source projects became successful, including:

• Open Office (a Microsoft Office look-alike) • Firebox (a browser) • MySQL (a DBMS, see Chapter 5)

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• Apache (a Web server, see Chapter 6) • Ubuntu (a Windows-like desktop operating system) • Android (a mobile-device operating system) • Cassandra (a NoSQL DBMS, see Chapter 5) • Hadoop (a BigData processing system, see Chapter 9)