LoginLogic » Philosophy » Open-source
Open-source software competes directly with traditional software companies; Open-source software has the potential to erode many existing revenues obtained as a result of software development.

Open-source software has recently received wide acceptance from commercial industry.

LAMP is an open source web server platform that is both powerful and stable. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This software combination permits one to build and customize a high performance web server without any license fees.

http://www.linuxforum.com/lamp-manual.php

When the source code of a computer program is made available free of charge to the general public, it's known as open source. The basis of open source software is to produce more useful and bug-free products for everyone to use. The concept relies on peer review to find and eliminate bugs in the program code, a process which commercially developed and packaged programs do not utilize. The open source initiative (OSI) reviews then certifies open source programs. They have a stringent list of criteria that include making sure no one collects a royalty on the software and no person, group or field of endeavor can be denied access to the program.

Open-source software is a different philosophy of software creation and distribution, it's not a completely different technology.

Most large corporations already use some form of OSS, whether they realize it or not.

"It's because it's open and you can see how it works and if you don't like how it works you can collaborate and change. It's about freedom that's not tied to product cycles, but to the limits of people's innovation."
- John Patrick, former vice president of Internet technology at IBM and now president of the consulting organization Attitude LLC

Open-source software development is coupled with the proven ability to include and critically mange contributions made by many internationally located developers. This development approach exists within traditional software companies, however these companies have to compete with input received from much larger development teams.

"It's like the whole world is working on this at once", "Open source is more than a hippie dream"
- Linus Torvalds.

Most open-source software is licensed under the GNU general public license. The GNU general public license is a form of copyright that is commonly applied to software that the authors wish to distribute for the common good. paraphrased, it says that the software may be altered and re-distributed as desired but that the original code must also be distributed.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#TOCGPL