OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGY

Open source code is made available free of charge to the general public. The rationale for this is that a large community of developers who are not concerned with proprietary ownership will produce a more useful and bug-free product for everyone's benefit. The open source concept relies on community members to find and eliminate bugs in the program code, a process which commercially developed and packaged programs do not utilize. The process of eliminating bugs and improving the software happens at a much quicker rate than through the traditional development channels of commercial software. The information is shared throughout the open source community and does not originate nor channel through a corporation's research and development department.