# <a name="Brief_summary"> Brief summary </a>

As stated by the Open Source Initiative on their home page:

"The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits."

-- <http://www.opensource.org/>

Unlike [[FreeSoftware]], [[OpenSource]] does not put as much emphasis into the issue as the [Free Software Foundation](http://www.fsf.org). Several open source licenses exist, including the traditional [[GeneralPublicLicense]], GPL.

In the spirit of keeping things short, please read up on the various licenses on their respective home pages.

-- [[Main/JoachimNilsson]] - 11 May 2002