What is open source software?

Open source software is simply the future paradigm of software development. People who use software work with people who develop software to cut out the marketing hype and cost to simply deliver feature rich and stable software. There are a range of business models for why people would collaborate in this way - but the majority of projects work via a support model. That is to say, you would pay people for their expertise and time according to your specific requirements rather than paying a license cost for all eternity. Open source is good for you because it means:

• you get software that does what you want it to do - not what a large corporate wants to sell you.
• as a large number of people look at open source code, bugs in the code are identified and fixed faster so you don't have to wait unnecessarily for your problem to be solved
• you have the flexibility to extend the software to work in the way that you do - without bearing the cost of a completely new and untested software development.