CLASS XII
INFORMATICS PRACTICES
CHAPTER 2
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE CONCEPTS
Chapter 2 : Open Source Software Concepts
You all have worked on various types of Software like Operating System
(Windows XP, Windows 7 etc.) , Office Suits (MS Office, Lotus etc.) and
Computer Games Software etc.You cannot change their features because they all
are Proprietary Software i.e. they are intellectual property of any developer
or organization and source code is also not given.But some Software comes with
their source code and allows us to make any type of change without taking
permission of the developer. These categories of software are called Open Source
Software (OSS).
Types
of Software:
v Free Software –
Free Software are those which are freely accessible, freely accessible,
freely used, changed, improved, copied and distributed. It provides all
types of freedom. The term ‘Free’ means ‘Freedom’ at very little or No cost.
The Source Code is also available with Free Software.
v Open Source Software:
Open Source Software can be freely used, changed, improved, copied and
Re-distributed but it may have some cost
for the media and support for further development.Source Code is also
available with OSS. It can be modified and redistributed with some guidelines.
The License may restrict source-code from being distributed and
modification to maintain the Author’s integrity.
A software which is FREE as well as
OPEN, called Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) or Free Libre & Open
Source Software (FLOSS).
v Proprietary Software:
These Software are neither open nor freely available. They must
have some cost and Source code is also
not given since it is property of the developer organization. No change,
copy and distribution are allowed.
v Freeware:
These are available free of cost. They can
be used, copied, distributed but no modification is allowed because Source
Code is not available.
v Shareware:
These software are freely used, copied and distributed for a certain
period of time. After expiry, you have to purchase or uninstall them.
Modification is not possible due to non-availability of the source code. These are the Demo
version and freely distributed for trial purpose.
Examples of OSS/Free Software
v GNU/Linux:
Linux is Free & Open Source Operating System software. It is available
with source code so that anyone can use, modify and redistribute it. Originally
it was developed by a Finnish University student Linus Torvalds in 1991. It
comes in many flavors (editions) and is member of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python) group.
v Apache:
Apache is Open Source Web Server available for many OS platforms like
Linux, Unix, Windows etc. It is developed by an open community of developers
under the umbrella of Apache Software Foundation. It is also a member of LAMP
group.
v MySQL:
MySQL is most popular open source Relational Database System. It is
muti-user, SQL based RDBMS. It works on
many platforms like Linux, Mac, OS/2,
Sun OS and MS Windows etc. and supports many programming languages such as C, C++, Java, Perl,
PHP and Ruby etc.
v PHP:
PHP stands for
Hypertext Preprocessor. It is widely used open source Web programming language
to develop Dynamic web content and Server-side applications. PHP is
similar to MS ASP/VB Script/JAVA Script and CGI/Perl languages. PHP allows
compatibility with a large number of RDBMS like MySQL, Oracle, DB2 etc. and run
on most of the OS including Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac. It is also a member
of LAMP group.
v Mozilla:
Mozilla is free and very popular Web Application suit, originally
developed by Netscape Communications Corporation. Now days, it is promoted by
Mozilla Foundation. It includes various applications like- Web Browser (Fire
Fox), E-mail Client (Thunder Bird) and HTML Editor
v PostgreSQL:
PostgreSQL is free Object Oriented
database Server. It is alternative to Open source MySQL and works like Orcle,
MS SQL Server and Sybase etc.
v Python:
Python is open-source Cross-platform
programming language created by Guido Van Rossum in 1990 for Python Software
Foundation. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix etc.
v Tomcat:
Tomcat is a collection of Server-side Applications (Servlet) developed
under Apache Foundation. It can run independently or with any other web server
to provide various functionalities like User authentication and security. It is
bundled with Apache Server.
v Pango:
Pango is an open-source framework for the layout and rendering of Text and
GUI for GNOME Desktop environment. Pango uses Unicode for all of its encoding
and support all major languages. The name is derived from Greek word Pan +
Japanese word Go.
v Bharat
Operating System Solutions(BOSS):
BOSS is free
Windows like Indian OS based on GNU/Linux developed by C-DAC and is available
in various Indian Languages.
v OpenOffice:
OpenOffice or OpenOffice.org (OOo) is free office application suit like MS
Office, developed under GPL and is available for MS Windows, Mac and UNIX-like
OS.OOo is based on StarOffice and made open source by Sun Microsystems. It is
similar to MS Office software.OOo Includes various components like Write (like
MS Word), Calc (like MS Excel), Impress (like Power point) and Database (like
MS Access).
Software Standard:
Software Standard
refers the structural specifications which are followed by the developers,
organizations and vendors. There are two
types of software standards –
v Proprietary Standard
Proprietary standard are
those standards which belong to a company or person. Their specifications are
available to users with restricted license. They cannot be publicly used and
users have to buy license to use them.Example: Microsoft Office format (.doc,
.docx, .ppt, .xls etc.)
v Open Standard
Open standard is open to
all i.e. It is publicly and freely available without any restrictions to user.
Advantages of Open
Standard:
§
Availability: It
is freely available
for all to read and implement without
any royalty or fees.
Example of Open
Standard:
§
Hyper
Text Markup Language(HTML):It is standard language for the web page. It is
flexible, universal format
and can be read through any web browser program.
§
Joint Photo Expert Group (JPEG or .jpg):It is one of the most efficient still
picture compression format. It is open and very light format.
It also allows you to determine the rate of data compression.
§
Portable Network
Graphics (.png): PNG
is open and license free format, alternative to .GIF. Generally it is used to display or
transport images on Internet /web applications. It allows data compression
without loss of information.
§
Open
Document Format (ODF): ODF is an XML based, open and free file format for
representing and storing electronic documents such as document, spreadsheet
etc.It is default file format for the application like OpenOffice, StarOffice
and IBM’s Workspace. It is also supported by some proprietary software like MS
Office 2007.
The common ODF
extensions are- .odt (Text document), .ods (Spread sheet document), .odp
(Presentation document) and .odg (Graphics file)
.mp3,.vqf and .wma etc. It is free, open and unpatented standard used to
store and play digital music. Ogg is
the name of container format for the Audio/Vidio and Vorbis is name of specific Audio compression scheme that is part of
.ogg format.
Indian
Language Computing:
Indian Language
computing refers to ability to interact in diverse Indian language on
electronic system.To facilitate ICT usage for rural people of India, Ministry
of Communication & Information Technology, Govt. of India, provided
software to promote Indian Languages.
How to
represent character in Memory?
v ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
It is widely used
alphanumeric code system and universally accepted for the computers. It is
7-bit code and comprises 128 characters to represent standard keyboard
characters (26 Small and Capital letters of alphabets, 10 digits and 7
punctuation marks) and various control characters.
v ISCII
(Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange)
The Burou of
Indian Standard adapted the ISCII code. It
is 8-bit code with 256 characters, which
refers 128 characters of ASCII and rest 128 characters for Indian
Scripts. It is widely used by Indian Government Departments (e.g. NIC, Election Commission etc.) for their various
IT projects.
v UNICODE
It is universal
coding standard developed by Universal Consortium as a computing platform. It
is 2- Byte code which represents country encoding and characters of their
scripts. Unicode supports Indian Scripts including Devnagri,
Bengali, Gurumukhi, Gujrati, Oriya, Tamil, Telgu, Kannada and Malyalam etc.
different countries languages without redesigning it.
Fonts:
Fonts refers to set of displayable text characters (glyphs) having
specific style and size.Basically a font is the resource file for displaying or
printing characters of different language script on screen or printer.There are
three categories of font: Post Script, True Type Font and Open Type Font.
v
Post Script Font: It
was developed by Adobe in 1980,
to facilitate printing and displaying of text in various styles. These fonts require
Adobe Type Manager (ATM) utility for working.
v
True Type Font: It
is developed by Apple and licensed to Microsoft.
It is 8 bit font whichis compatible with Microsoft Windows and MAC OS.
v
Open Type Font: It
is the extension of the True Type Font Format
which is 16 bits font and support 65536 characters (Unicode characters).
v
Static
Font: The characters are designed and digitized, and then stored in a font
file. Eeach time when printing takes place the same characters will appear with
same shape. Times New Roman, Arial, Courier etc. are static font.
v
Dynamic Font: The characters are redefined at each
occurrence rather than static
appearance. All the hand written font such as Calligraphic
letters etc. belongs to this category, because each time when they are
generated, font shape may differ to previous
one.
Indian Language Text Entry:
Many software tools have been developed
to facilitate the typing of Indian Language Text. They support two types of
entry-
v Phonetic
Text Entry
In Phonetic Entry,
the traditional QWERTY keyboard (English) is used but Indian alphabets are
written phonetically i.e. the way they sound. The combinations of keys are used
to represent more characters. By transliteration
(e.g. Google Hindi Input S/w), you can type Indian Words in English script
and tool will automatically convert it corresponding language words.
It is supported by
many search engines, Social Networking site (Orkut, facebook etc.) and many
websites (Blogger, Gmail etc.). Bhartiya OOo is also widely used for phonetic
text typing.
v Key
Map Based Entry
In Key map entry, mapping of keyboard’s key to character is arranges so
that key map represents to Indian Language Set.Indian Language Key map or
Inscript Key map is implemented by a Key map table containing all the
information regarding translation.
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