Since the advent of the Internet and web, perhaps there is no movement more important and influential than the Open Source movement.
https://opensource.org/
Open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone. Open source software is made by many people, and distributed under licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition
The open source movement has produced many excellent licensing options, including:
- Apache License 2.0
- BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" license
- BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" or "FreeBSD" license
- GNU General Public License (GPL)
- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)
- MIT license
- Mozilla Public License 2.0
- Common Development and Distribution License
- Eclipse Public License
It has produced impassioned dialogue, awareness, and visibility to key considerations behind ensuring people have free and open access to technologies they can leverage to make a difference.
When given a choice, we almost always choose open source solutions. This ensures we can have access to the code and control our usage of technologies. You never know when a vendor will change their business model, and you may be at the mercy of their decisions, whereas with open source, you can have a complete copy of the code and freely modify and maintain the solutions to best fit your needs.
We talk a lot about communities - and the open source movement has the finest collection of technology communities in the world.
We use:
- Linux
- Apache
- MySQL, PostgreSQL
- PHP, Perl, Python
- and many more
