Page:Open Source Philosophy and the Dawn of Aviation.pdf/3

Open Source Philosophy and the Dawn of Aviation up the project after two crashes on take-off on October 7 and December 8, both in 1903.

If the Wright brothers had established a collaborative work with Langley, they probably would have had access to the impressive 50-hp engine that was developed for the Aerodrome airplane. This would have provided the United States with a giant leap in Aviation at that time.

Concerning the Aerodrome, it was rebuilt by the American aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss, who struggled in court against the Wright brothers. After Curtiss introduced some structural reinforcements to aerodrome, he performed successful flights with the airplane (Schmitt, 1990), Afterwards, the Smithsonian Institute initiated a campaign to credit Langley the first flight of a heavier-than-air vehicle. The dispute was terminated in 1942 after the Institute withdrew its request (Schmitt, 1990). The aerodrome was restored to its original configuration and is currently on display in the Smithsonian Museum.

These examples from Europe and the United States are reinforced by others along the present paper, in order to sustain the thesis that Europe was more successful in the development of aviation in the early 20th century because an open source philosophy was established there. In addition, an overview of Aviation in both continents is provided for the same purpose.

Progress report of open source philosophy

The concept of open source and the free sharing of technological information existed long before computers became present in our everyday life. For example, cooking recipes have been shared since the beginning of human culture. Open source can be present in business, software, and any kind of technological knowledge.

The advent of the Internet has reshaped the way people communicate and work. More specifically, after broadband Internet connections have been made available to ordinary people, the Internet found its path to generalized business and grew exponentially. In an opposite direction to the business side, a lot of open source projects, encompassing the world online community, emerged. Most of those ventures are highly and undoubtedly successful, Linux, a Unix-like operating system, is the most prominent example of such initiative. Linux is largely driven by its developers and user communities. Some vendors develop and fund their distributions on a voluntary basis, Debian is a well-known example of this. Others maintain a community version of their commercial distributions, as Red Hat does with Fedora, Even the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM) surrendered to its appeals and replaced its in-house AIX operating system by the Linux one.

Wikipedia is another mainstream example of open source effort to make things happen. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has described it as “an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest quality to every single person on the planet in his or her own language.” Such website exists to bring knowledge to everyone who seeks it. Wikipedia is an online free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Who owns the encyclopedia? The articles hosted on this site are released by their authors under the GNU Free Documentation License (or a free license), so the articles are free content and may be reproduced freely, under the same license.

A generalized initiative for the development of open source projects is the SourceForge one (SourceForge, 2012). SourceForge.net is the world’s largest open source software development website. It hosts more than 324,000 projects (status from January 2012) and over 1 million registered users with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and codes. SourceForge.net has the largest repository of open source code and applications available on the Internet and hosts more open source development products than any other site or network worldwide. It also provides a wide variety of services to projects they host, and to the Open Source community.

Another project that seeks help from the online community is the SETI@home, which is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Anyone can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and receiver’s electronics) and man-made signals, such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. The modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power. Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of data analysis.

In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea, which was originally launched in May 1999. The reason for asking the online community for helping to process radio telescope signals is caused because the researchers are limited by the amount of computer power available for data analysis. To tease out the weakest signals, a J. Aerosp. Technol. Manag., São José dos Campos, Vol.4, No 3, pp. 355-379, Jul.-Sep., 2012 357