Business of Free and Open Software (FOSS)

Introducing Free & Open Source Software (FOSS)

These are software that gives you the liberty to use, copy, study, modify, and distribute it in any way and any form. Importantly the source code is made available for anyone to view and modify to and make it better, in contrast to proprietary software, where the underlying source code is usually hidden from the users.

Benefits of FOSS

The benefits of using FOSS can include decreasing software costs, increasing security and stability (especially in regard to malware), protecting privacy, and giving users more control over their own hardware. Free, open-source operating systems such as Linux and descendants of BSD are widely utilized today, powering millions of servers, desktops, smartphones (e.g. Android), and other devices. Free software licenses and open-source licenses are used by many software packages. (Wikipedia)

Business of FOSS

Its unbelievable that the underlying concept of FOSS is a business Model, you might find it difficult to believe but just follow along with this post. Considering the cost of developing, supporting, and maintaining a proprietary software is alarming it eats into lots of business running cost and is a no Go area for small businesses (For any business/individual who might have engaged in this endeavor, will understand what I am talking about) High cost of software led to software piracy and other computer vices. FOSS help obviate all the issue of software piracy (Why would anybody want to pirate software that is Openly available). There are many businesses model attached to FOSS but I will just point out part of them, which include the dual licensing, extended services, and many undefined businesses models.
Most enterprise and mission critical FOSS software are released under dual licensed i.e they are partly free and partly paid for or completely free and you pay for technical and training support. Take the case of software like Red Hat Linux, they claim the software is free but you pay for technical support (Making millions of dollars from this) or just consider ordinary WordPress and its extensions which is freely available, most of the free themes and plugins have limited functionalities and you will be prompted to pay for the pro version of the theme that has additional features beyond the basic functionalities.

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