An Open Source Software development is a process which this or any other similar working software whose codes, or so called source codes are available for usage for any average man. They started out from 1997 as simple open source software, and now can be found in many different forms, styles and types. Some examples are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Android, and many other. Let’s see the history of the development of OSS.
In 1997, Eric S. Raymond wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In this book, Raymond makes the distinction between two kinds of software development. The first is the conventional closed-source development. This kind of development method is, according to Raymond, like the building of a cathedral; central planning, tight organization and one process from start to finish. The second is the progressive open-source development, which is more like "a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles." The latter analogy points to the discussion involved in an open-source development process.
Differences between the two styles of development, according to Bar &Fogel, are in general the handling (and creation) of bug reports and feature requests, and the constraints under which the programmers are working.[2] In closed-source software development, the programmers are often spending a lot of time dealing with and creating bug reports, as well as handling feature requests. This time is spent on creating and prioritizing further development plans. This leads to part of the development team spending a lot of time on these issues, and not on the actual development. Also, in closed-source projects, the development teams must often work under management-related constraints (such as deadlines, budgets, etc.) that interfere with technical issues of the software.
Several types of open-source projects exist. First, there is the garden variety of software programs and libraries, which consist of standalone pieces of code. Some might even be dependent on other open-source projects. These projects serve a specified purpose and fill a definite need. Examples of this type of project include the Linux kernel, the Firefox web browser and the Apache OpenOffice office suite of tools.
Distributions are another type of open-source project. Distributions are collections of software that are published from the same source with a common purpose. The most prominent example of a "distribution" is an operating system. There are many GNU/Linux distributions (such as Debian, Fedora Core, Mandriva, Slackware, Ubuntu etc.) which ship the Linux kernel along with many user-land components. There are other distributions, like ActivePerl, the Perl programming language for various operating systems, and Cygwin distributions of open-source programs for Microsoft Windows.
Other open-source projects, like the BSD derivatives, maintain the source code of an entire operating system, the kernel and all of its core components, in one revision control system; developing the entire system together as a single team. These operating system development projects closely integrate their tools, more so than in the other distribution-based systems.