Free & Open Source Software

"Free as in Freedom: Open Distribution; Open Modification"

"Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!"15

"Can I still make profit with my software when putting it out as open source? The answer is as simple as the question: You can make profit, but you will make in a different way, especially with value-added services and higher level products built on the open source software base."16

One myth, if you will, that is perpetuated about FOSS is that it is free, and as such, it does not fit in well within our capitalist economic systems. Contrary to the myth though, there are FOSS applications that are very successful commercial endeavours. IBM's revenues from GNU/Linux was approximately $1B for 2003, and is expected to double for 2004. IDC, an IT market research and consulting firm, prognosticates that GNU/Linux sales will hit $9.1B in 2008.17 MySQL revenues were doubled in 2003 to $12.6M. Yahoo.com runs on the FreeBSD platform; while Apple's Mac OS X is based on OpenBSD. IBM's Websphere is based on the Apache Web Server.

Beyond commercial success, FOSS applications are popular:

* instralled base