An Open Source Primer

Accounting Technology,  December, 2005  

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Open source may mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But one thing that it doesn't mean is free software, one widespread interpretation.

Technically, the term "open source" means source code that complies with the licensing standards of the Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit consortium that promotes open source. Open source products have the software code freely available for development by programmers. This is as opposed to Windows, which can be sold only by Microsoft, and which does not make its code available for modification. Open source, on the other hand, can be offered by multiple companies. As explained at www.opensource.org, "You can sell your code. Red Hat does it all the time. What you can't do is stop someone else from selling your code as well." ...