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What is Open Source?

Open Source is gaining wide acceptance. Though often misunderstood  - it is often linked exclusively with Linux for example - it is starting to make serious inroads in the enterprise.  Once the province of specialized infrastructure, such as operating system or networking, there is now a large and growing portfolio of applications. 

It is useful to consider Open Source as having three aspects

Open Source Methods: 
A set of tools and processes for managing an extremely loosely-coupled development team. The Open Source developers on a particular project often have not met except through online communication, do not share an employer, may not reside on the same continent, and may not even share a common language. These developers have demonstrated that extremely valuable projects can be carried out using resources and methods that would previously have been considered inadequate to the task. 

Open Source methods can greatly benefit non-Open-Source operations. Large companies share many of the problems of the Open Source developers: geographical distribution, local differences in business direction, lack of a common language.  Large businesses are plagued by duplication of effort and loss of intellectual property and expertise related to their own products, and poor productivity and personal fulfillment, which reduces efficiency and may lead to loss of key employees along with their expertise. Open Source methods can address, or at a minimum ameliorate, many of these problems.

Open Source Licensing:
The particular form of covenant between collaborators embodied in Open Source licensing seems to have resulted in more successful collaboration. 

The nine basic tenets of Open Source licensing tend to create a fair partnership of peers, in which all peers are confident to do software development even though they are participating with their most direct competitors. 
Open Source developers can circumvent any other Open Source developer who tries to block them, because all  have the same rights to the Open Source code.

The Open Source Community:
The Open Source community is a very-loosely-coupled group of individuals, companies, and organizations that are united only in the use of a particular paradigm of software development and licensing. Among the individual open source developers there is also a common (though not universal) set of ideals.

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