What is Open-Source Software Development?

What the world was like before Open-Source Software projects...

During the height of the dot com in Silicon Valley the business model of web software development was to find a niche market in need of a software module.  Countless hours would be spent by internal designers - programmers - marketing / sales people.  There would be a huge effort put forth by 100s of people before the launch.  After the launch a loyal customer base was expected to pay for license fees or for upgrades.  The client in the end was delivered a static design/result.  Support might have been offered but changing the source code was very expensive and tedious.

Since programmers had their own style, often it would be easier to re-write a module than try to understand how another coder solved the problem in a historical way.

This led to a very protectionist attitude towards source code and sharing was unheard of. Open-Source has turned that model on its head and gives the goods away for free.  You may ask: How does this work and maintain sustainablility?  The community benefits from a rapid development and testing cycle that can't be matched by any single team!

The concept of Open-Source got its start in 1991 with a guy by the name of Linus Torvalds.   He was a university computer geek-type that was unhappy with the performance of his computer's operating system.  His frustration led him to write a new operating system...lucky for him he was pretty smart!

Few people can program an OS but that was not his stroke of genuis.

What set Linus apart was that he shared his source code with other academics for peer evaluation and review.  This community of programmers sent him suggestions on how to make his code better, to which he diligently included all beneficial changes.

Voila...the start of a new software era!

By sharing his source code Linus could leverage not only his own brillance but the shared intellect of his peers.  The next step was to share his Operating System (OS) with other computer programmers around the world.  The process of peer evaluation and review snowballed into the revolutionary Linux OS that today serves up a good part of the web.

The concept of Open-Source projects has moved into other IT projects.  The website CMS Open-Source project that ONWEB is currently advising our clients to use is called Drupal.  You can find more information by visiting the organization's website drupal.org

As of September 2011, there were 1,000,000+ Drupal users/developers.