What is Open Source

What is "Open Source Software"

"Open Source Software" is software developed by the open source community of software programmers. It is normally available for download from the Internet, free of charge. For example, the Open Voting Consortium's software is being developed as a "SourceForge.net" project. SourceForge is home to over 100,000 open source projects and has over 1,000,000 registered developers.

The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) software is accessed as Source Forge project evm2003, with 26 listed developers. Anyone may access the source and documentation, although it does take experience to understand how to analyze it. However only the registered developers for this project may change the source.

Some of the more successful open source projects include:

  1. Linux - A popular PC operating system, used on over 7 million computers
  2. Apache Web Server - serves about 63% of all web pages on the Internet
  3. Sendmail - transports about 70% of all the email on the Internet
  4. Bind - The system which translates names, such as "election-reform.us" into addresses which your browser can reach.
  5. Perl, Python, and PHP - Three very popular programming languages used on the World Wide Web.

The "California Performance Review" issued by the Governor's staff states:

"The state should more extensively consider use of open source software, which can in many cases provide the same functionality as closed source software at a much lower total cost of ownership."
and
"Incorporate open source software as a viable alternative to any software procurement."

Open source is not just about cost. Once you switch to open source, you are no longer tied to a particular hardware vendor, and can find many more programmers to fix problems in the application.