If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. - Isaac Newton

Some people equate open source to free of payment software, but this not necessarily true, nor the most important aspect of the open source movement. Actually, all business people know that "there is nothing like a free lunch". Even when software is free of license cost, there is at least an implicit cost of implementation.

Concept

The real significance of the open source is the freedom to build on the works of other people. Having a launching platform for not having to start from scratch on every project. The Linksys WRT54G, the most popular internet router in history, was developed using open source software to shorten the time to market. And enthusiasts around the world used the original Linksys open source firmware as a base to add router features that where only available in corporate router costing several hundred dollars.

This movement have some analogies with the Pay it Forward movie, but it is better. It is not as utopian, and actually, impacts several dimensions of the human society and economy.

All it starts with an Open Design, and real willingness to foster the key elements of the openess:

1. Collaboration, cooperative design and crowd-sourcing set a framework for participation, peer review, auto-critique and fine tuning of the end product.
2. Free knowledge and open education sets the base for enabling current and future generation to take full advantage of the new technology.
3. Royalty Free Open Standards foster free competition that commoditizes the goods and breaks down artificial monopolistic markets.

When all these factors are combined together you get a faster pace of innovation. The kind of innovation that our economy needs to get back up to speed. At the same time, you lower the barrier to entry to the best technology as small business and individuals have free choice to select the best source of the technology, at the lowest cost. As a rule of economics, higher benefits and lower cost is a winning formula to increase value and production. This new value and production have a multiplicative effect that stimulates our economy on areas well beyond the technology sector.

Could you imagine an open source car? You could buy parts from any vendor and mix standard based components to customize your car according to your preference, at a very low price. Or a really open source cell phone platform, where you can bring whatever phone you want, and customize to your liking?

History

The open source movement is not a new initiative. Actually, is just the rescue of the original practice. Previous to the 70s, all software was open source, but during this 70s and 80s all software developers moved to closed software to increase their profits. But then, starting in the 90s the open source movement started to make its way again. Originally, it was disregarded as impractical by its detractors, but by 2006 Microsoft was purchasing $240 millons of Suse Linux (open source OS and competitor to Windows), and in 2009 it made its first donation to the Open Source community.

Actually, the open source movement is not about software anymore. It is about everything related to intellectual property and design. You will see open source projects from obvious areas like hardware, to a not IT projects like the Solar Heat Pump Electrical Generation System, to even the making of better medicines.

How it works

Open source projects share some common traits with regular, proprietary development, but not all of them. Each project needs a purpose, an inspiration. And to be really successful, it needs good organization. The Open Source Textbook initiative in California had a purpose, but was not properly organized.

Like always, usually it works best when you have a good leader. Check here a video of Nicholas Negroponte and its One Laptop Per Child project. Awesome. Or the extremely successful story of Ubuntu, lead by its founder and second self-founded space-tourist, Mark Shuttleworth, from Canonical.

But even more important, open source relies on a community. This is an amorphous mix of programmers, project managers, technical writers, designers and power users, whom at the same time are just users. This is the community were you first tap on for support, before hiring a contractor (from the same community) to help on custom design or exceptionally difficult issues.

Ignoring the importance of the community could be suicidal, as project leaders from Mambo and Twiki learned the hard way. Actually, there are several examples of projects with a community that is so strong, that no single leader is required, like XBMC - an awesome media center running on the original Xbox, as well as Linux, OS X or Windows PCs - or the $80 home server based in Linksys's NSLU2.

As most open source communities are distributed across geographies around the world, most of them use a mailing list or preferable, a forum to keep communicated. They share questions or success stories for all to see and learn together. If you have a question it is expected that you do a search for the same question on the forum to see if it was been answered before. Check a forum of the Aurora Mixer here (home made DJ mixer).

Not-so-open-source cases

Some software vendors use the open source model as a marketing strategy, which is not bad as long they really adopt the complete model. But other use it only as a marketing gimmick to get popularity or even worst, to foster their monopolistic agenda. That is the case of Moblin - an really revolutionary Linux based Operating System tailored for the small displays found in the increasingly popular netbooks. Well, everything about Moblin is good, except, it does not run on non-Intel processors (AMD, Via, etc.). Actually, it does not run even on some old Intel processors. Moblin is artificially locked for the Intel Atom (while it also runs on other modern Intel processors). Google's Chrome OS on the other hand, will run even on processors as diverse as the same processors used on smartphones today (ARM).

There are other vendors that distribute a limited crippled version of the application as open source, but keep the really useful modules as closed source. This, with the intention of getting your attention before making you the closed source sale.

Beware the (other guy's) lawyers

As always, lawyers find a way to enter every aspect of what we do, and open source is no exception. To manage them, the open source community invented a term paradoxically called 'copyleft'. While you can read the explanation here, copyleft is the concept of using the copyright law to make sure that what you created to be open, remains open. To ensure that nobody claims ownership of the open design, to close access to it and get an unfair monetary advantage of the work created by the community.

But, just a concept is not enough nitty-gritty for a litigant, so people have been required to define specific licenses to managed the details of the copyleft. The Free Software Foundation makes and excellent explanation of many of the open and the arguable open license in circulation nowadays. Check their advise to make sure that the license that you choose to use is really open (not a fake open license with restrictions).

The most popular licenses available belong to these two groups:

• Open without conditions - I grant you open access to my works, and you do with it as you want (no giving back required). A popular license in this group is BSD.
• Open with restrictions - I grant you access to my works but, if you improve it and distribute the program in binary format, then you must make available the source code with your improvements (act of giving back). A popular license in this group is GPL.

Each group has its proponents, with very good arguments.

This copyleft (or copyright) concept extends to all intellectual property, including your Twiter postings or your Facebook photos. If you want to assert your rights to your Facebook content, make sure to visit the Creative Commons Facebook application. But before, you can learn about the six licenses from Creative Commons here.