Prior to the birth of the Internet, it was assumed that all software costs money, and it could not
be altered or re-packaged in any way by the end user. After all, who would spend countless
hours creating commercial grade software just to give it away for free, not to mention letting
others modify and re-distribute it? Then, along came the Internet, and it enabled hundreds of
thousands of programmers from around the world to come together in a single community to
share their ideas. This created a concept, called "Open Source", in which programmers
distributed their software along with its source code free of charge under a license called General
Public License or GPL. The beauty of this concept is that other programmers can improve upon
the original program and redistribute it without violating the terms of its license. One would ask,
why would programmers do this? The answer is simple, recognition. Most programmers who are
heavily involved in the Open Source community, are just that, programmers. They are not
business people, but mostly academic types who derive personal satisfaction from their work
being recognized and praised by others, rather than monetary compensation. Their contribution
to the Open Source community is equivalent to that of doctors and scientists who publish
research articles in trade journals.

Thus the birth of the Linux operating system, Apache web server, Qmail mail server, Proftpd FTP
server, BIND DNS server, MySQL database server, and thousands more similar applications which
are as good if not better than their commercially available counterparts. The only factor that
distinguished this software from its commercial alternative, is that there was no single entity (we
will call it "big brother") that offered support. Therefore to implement and support Open Source
software, the end user needed to do independent research, and communicate with other
members of the Open Source community. The largest and most obvious benefit of Open Source is
that the software is absolutely free to those who know where to find it. Another is the freedom
to modify the code for your own needs as you see fit without paying licensing fees, or getting
anyone's permission. This allows you to upgrade and customize your own software as needed,
without having to rely on and pay "big brother" to do it for you when and if they decide it's
necessary. Generally, commercial software makers have a direct financial incentive to get users
to upgrade, so you may also be forced to pay for upgrades that are truly not needed in order to
continue receiving support for the product you purchased.

What type of Open Source applications are available, and where do you find more information on
them? There is one simple answer, Google. Google, itself being run entirely on an Open Source
software platform, has a wealth of articles and email communications from the Open Source
community that probably addresses every bit of code ever written, as well as all known bugs that
were ever found. The amazing thing is that you will most likely get an answer to any problem you
are having with an Open Source product from Google faster than you would is you had a "big
brother" product, and called their support line. For example, if you want to find an Open Source
mail server, you would simply do a search in Google for "open source mail server". There is a
staggering 12,000,000 results, so as you see paying for a commercial mail server would be a
complete waste of company money. Now let's say you downloaded an open source program
written in PHP, and you can't seem to get past an error that says, "Parse error: parse error,
unexpected T_STRING", and you want to find out what is causing that output, you would simply
do a search on Google for "Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING". You will then see
over 72,000 articles related to that particular error with many solutions. As another example,
let's say you want to write your own program in PHP, but not sure what PHP's Regular
Expression syntax is, you would do a search for "PHP regular expressions". A result would be
over 500,000 articles, including manuals, examples and real code. The bottom line is, if what you
are trying to do has ever been done by any of the hundreds of thousands of Open Source
programmers, you will find it in Google, and if it hasn't you will most likely find out how close
someone has gotten, and maybe even be the one to find the missing link. If you do not want to
tackle the project, you would of course again turn to Google and search for "open source
developers", and find over 9,000,000 results.

For maximum functionality, speed, reliability, and security, we highly recommend using the PHP
scripting language with a MySQL database, hosted on a Linux platform for development of all
back-end web applications (in case you are wondering, all of these are 100% Open Source). An
Application written in PHP, typically requires 30%-50% less code and development effort than if
it was written in any other language. PHP is also very easy to learn, it has the most free online
documentation and support, and it is increasingly being deployed in large scale enterprise
applications by companies like IBM (click here to see IBM's PHP efforts) and Oracle (click here to
read Oracle's reasons for choosing PHP). With over 10 years of developing web applications for
ourselves and thousands of clients from around the world, we have yet to come across a task
which could not be handled using this platform.

For an example of commercial grade desktop open source software, click here to download a free
copy of the Firefox web browser, if you have not already tried it.