Open Source, as defined by the Open Source Initiative, is as follows:

History of Open Source

Since the release of its source code for Netscape Navigator (the predecessor to Mozilla Firefox) to the public domain in 1998 by Netscape Communications, the open source movement has come a long way. Today, Open Source software has become ubiquitous, and its proliferation has been aided, in part, by the advent of the Internet and its availability.

Open Source software is now available for a wide range of applications catering to personal as well as business needs for software solutions. The best examples of open software for personal use are Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice office suite.

Open Source Business Applications

In the business applications space, it has been a blossoming of a thousands flowers, with software catering to every imaginable business need emerging in the past 5 years or so. Many of these are led by communities of volunteer developers (e.g. Joomla and Drupal), while others are spear headed by commercial (often VC-backed) organizations that provide a free, open source community version of their software alongside  premium versions available at a fee, usually subscriptions based (e.g. MyERP, Magento and SugarCRM).

The Open Source Opportunity

Open Source business applications offers your the opportunity to move away from expensive vendor lock-ins with proprietary software and free your organization to explore software that is secure, affordable, transparent, perpetual, interoperable and localized.

At Perspective Solutions, we understand Open Source. If you would like to explore using Open Source for your organization's enterprise software needs, feel free to contact us.