What does 'free, open-source software' mean in this exactly?

Question

"Start-ups once required a lot of money, time and people. But over the past decade, free, open-source software and “cloud” services have brought costs down.." I read this in new york time article (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/technology/08class.html?hpw). What does it mean when it mentions 'free, open source software' in this article exactly??? Can anyone give some names of them?

Answer 1

It's where the devlopers not only give the program away for free but also the source code so that the program can be improved or offshoots developed. An example of this would be Kompozer which is an offshoot of NVU - http://www.nvu.com/



One of the biggest repositories of open source programs is at http://sourceforge.net/



Google are also helping the field - http://code.google.com/opensource/

Answer 2

Some examples of open source software are the GNU/Linux operating system, Open Office, the Firefox browser, and the Apache web server.

http://www.gnu.org

http://www.fsf.org

http://sourceforge.net

Answer 3

It means software that is distributed freely often under the GNU public license. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html



For example: OpenOffice which is a free alternative to Microsoft Office.

Answer 4

Linux is probably the most successful open source software you could ever think of.



Read here for more information on OSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software