Over the last few months, open source has gained momentum at Stanford University in the form of the Stanford Open Source Lab. Inspired by groups like the Free Software Foundation, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, Drupal, Openflows Community Technology Lab, and MIT’s Open Course Ware, a few people at Stanford decided to band together and dedicate their time and energies to the development of free/open/libre learning and knowledge resources.

There was a time when Open Source software was considered has poor man's software. Now, with the economy slowdown in all the industries, adoption of Open source software has increased dramatically and its common to hear from all the big entrepreneurs to adopt Open Source software.

Your company's IT department probably depends on at least one open source application. The software does the job, is budget-friendly, and it has an active open source community which is constantly upgrading the application. But few applications are perfect, whether proprietary or open source.

Custom system builders are among the specialists able to embrace open source as a new prospect for success. Linux's emergence as a completely viable open source operating system has attracted many start-ups on a budget, in addition to a growing recognition by proprietary vendors (and their enterprise and SMB clients) of the benefits of open solutions.

Our Lady of Lourdes College Foundation has followed the footsteps of Royal Roads University, Durham Academy, and Handsworth Grammar School by using Free and Open Source Software in their classroom. But this time, the school's administrators decided to take it one step further: eliminate all proprietary software from their computers and their courses and use FOSS exclusively.

Whenever you mention the phrase Open Source, most people think of Linux. Such is it’s popularity that even people not familiar with open source software have still heard of this mystical, geeky “software” called Linux. I think there is far more to Open Source than Linux.

I feel that is important for me to further analyze the benefits of open source software. In a previous post, I highlighted the cost-savings of open source and did not mention any of the other advantages that it provides. This post should provide a more balanced view of open source and the intrinsic benefits that free software provides.

Familiarity undoubtedly ranks among the largest barriers to open source adoption — software, like so many other things, is habit-forming. Much of that familiarity, at least among younger users, comes from the prevalence of proprietary applications in education, an area awash with government regulations, competitive bidding, and its own habit-induced hangups.

When I first found out about open source software, I felt the sky was the limit — with the source code, I could do anything now! But after working on open source ERP for the last seven years, I’ve come to realize that customizing software, even open source software, should not be taken lightly.