Understanding open source

There is a lot of talk about free software and open source, but when you dig a little, it seems that there are a lot of people, even among IT professionals, who have quite a superficial knowledge of the phenomenon.

On the one side, there are committed enthusiasts who thoroughly enjoy the community approach but do not always know the economic aspects and on the other, decision-makers from the business world who are increasingly sensitive to the benefits of open source solutions but know little of the philosophy and history or even issues concerning licences

This white paper is an introduction to the open source phenomenon, the biggest revolution affecting IT since the Internet. As we will see, the movement started before the web but the powerful upheaval of IT economics has only been felt over the past few years and is just starting.

The aim of this paper is to popularise, especially in trying to explain open source to those who are not involved in it, but are starting to sense its importance and need to understand the phenomenon better.

This white paper is distributed under “Paternity-No modification” 2.01 Creative Commons licence. It can be freely re-distributed.