The simplest and most general answer is that Open Source Software is free. Free meaning the freedom to use, deploy and investigate (the source code instructions are public) as you wish. Most Open Source software is also available at no cost; as in "free beer"!

Quoting the Open Source Wikipedia: "Open source describes the principles and methodologies to promote open access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is made available to the general public with either relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create user-generated software content through either incremental individual effort, or collaboration."

The Open Source movement and software development in particular has grown from a very niche anti-establishment underground collaboration into the fastest growing area of IT development today.

You may be surprised to know that today most organisations already use open source software either directly (nearly 70% of web servers use the open source Apache product) or indirectly (most of the infrastructure of the Internet is built on open source). Compared with some years ago, there is now such a wide variety of software available that organisations can look beyond a handful of high-cost proprietary offerings to meet almost every business need.

For some organisations, the diversity of open source offerings available today, can be an obstacle to adoption. How do you choose one from dozens of freely available web content management systems? How do you assess the strength of the development community behind the project? How can you best integrate the product into your existing IT environment? How do you feed your organisation's innovations back into an open source project to minimise the long-term maintenance cost to you?

This is where The Open Learning Centre can help. We live and breath Open Source, trawl the world's Software Forges for new and innovative projects, and have many years of business and commercial experience behind us. We are taking the geek out of Open Source...