Today, there is a lot of hype about open source in the IT Industry.

But the Question is that what is OpenSource?

Some People Say that opensource means free software i.e. the software which is said to be open source software will be freely available to the masses.

Other says that if the software is open source software then the “sourcecode” of the software i.e. the programming instructions are also available.

Actually, the above said things about open source are true but the actual power of open source is even more than this.

It is the power to use the available source code, modify it and redistribute the open source software according to your needs i.e. to create customized software that will fulfill all the requirements and above all the software need not to be created from scratch.

Another important benefit of open source is that no one person is responsible for developing the open source software. Although the basic idea may be of one person but that idea is implemented by multiple talented and passionate programmers all over the world. In other words, open source softwares are developed by the collaborative efforts of creative developers all over the world.
The main benefit of this kind of development environment is that the software which is being developed is mature, flexible, tested , contains less bugs, developed very fast and of a better quality in comparison to other traditionally developed softwares.

Now a Days, we have a wide range of open source softwares available in market.

For Development there are programming languages like php, ruby etc.
For backend there are databases like MYSQL.
Web servers like Apache.
Browsers like Mozilla Firefox.

The first development which is most significant in the open source development was the development of open source operating system, Linux.
Linux has evolved as a very good operating system over a span of few years and today we have number of different distributions and variety of third party software and applications for Linux operating system.
The main essence of open source is that there is no licensing fee and no one can copyright open source software.
It follows the rule - "ofthe people, by the people and for the people.”