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Open Source Libraries and APIs

A thought or two on the dueling standards problem: the issue here is supply vs. demand. Everyone writes their own text editor because it's a good programming exercise, but the appearance of dueling standards is more of an ego issue ("I can write a better API than you can"). If you have a favorite toy library, I don't mind hearing about it but realize that you probably have more to gain by helping to extend an existing system than by going it alone. Go take a look at the history of GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs or OpenBSD vs. The World if you don't know what I'm talking about.

I have to be rather selective about what I include. Please don't take it personally if you give me a suggestion and I reject it; remember, this is the "Where can I find Big Name Tarball X".

• Windowing Toolkits

  There are quite a number of these things out there. I present a few of the most important.

  • X Window System provides several widget sets, most notably the Athena widgets originally developed at MIT. X programming using its native interfaces, Xt and Xlib, is done, but is generally considered doing it the hard way; most classic X programs have long since been ported to newer toolkits.
  • Qt is the official widget API of the KDE project. It has been somewhat controversial in the past as its license was not truly Open Source at the time; this has changed and the Unix version is now covered at the developer's discretion either under its own license or the GPL.
  • GTK+ (the Gimp ToolKit) was originally developed for the GIMP image processing program and is now the official toolkit for the GNOME project.
  • LessTif was concieved as an Open Source clone of Motif from the Open Software Foundation; even though OSF has made Motif free for Open Source use now, LessTif continues for those unable to afford a Motif license for commercial use.
  • GnuStep -- A common theme here is APIs created to emulate a proprietary library. GnuStep grew out of a project to port some old NeXT code to another platform (don't remember which one) and became a full implementation of the OpenStep standard, continuing long after Apple bought out NeXT and folded NextStep into MacOS X. (Interestingly enough, apparently it just barely works on Darwin...)

• Graphics APIs

  • Mesa -- As close to a full open source implementation of OpenGL as you'll find out there, Mesa was instrumental in the early Linux gaming market. BSDish license
  • Quesa -- Named to rhyme with Mesa, Quesa (pronounced like the first two syllables of "quesadilla") is a freeware implementation of Apple's QuickDraw 3D architecture that was abandoned in favor of OpenGL. It has the advantage of being far more cross-platform than the original.

• Security APIs

  These can be somewhat controversial because of US export restrictions on cryptographic technology. However, the Internet being as wide-open as it is, security is vital to anyone who hooks up. As controversial as they may be, however, they're critical to e-commerce work as well as anyone who feels that privacy is important.

  Note that a strong case can be made for open sourcing any security product -- while it is that much easier to analyze the code for a weakness, open source cryptoware of any sort has the advantage of being theoretically immune to trap doors and other holes because it's trivial to fix them. If you need a security product of any sort on your system, give serious consideration to going the open source root first.

• OpenSSL is a package that implements the Secure Sockets Layer API. Based on an earlier package called SSLeay (whose current status seems to be undeterminable), OpenSSL is standard issue on OpenBSD.