Open Sesame: It's Time for Open Source Software.

(From ITWeb (South Africa) - AAGM)

Byline: Inus Gouws

In 1998 the open source campaign was launched as part of an effort to support the concept of "free software" on the grounds of reliability, cost and strategic business risk. Even though it isn't free but distributed under licences GPL, LGPL, BSD and MIT, keep in mind that royalties are still contributing but not always in terms of money. Since then, open source software has come of age and is now broadly accepted by software producers and consumers as a viable alternative.

Inus Gouws, a senior information management (IM) consultant at Computer Associates (Africa), charts the progress of the open source concept.

Open source software programs are those whose licences give users the freedom to run the programs for any purpose, to study and modify the programs, and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified programs without having to pay royalties to previous developers.

It is important not to confuse open source software with "non-commercial" software. Open source must be usable for business purposes. Antonyms of open source include "closed" and "proprietary".

Initially linked to the …