Whether it's a high profile project like Firefox that is used by millions or a smaller project like iColors that fills the smallest of needs you have, chances are you've heard of the open source movement. There are many people who believe that open source software should not exist and others who believe strongly that it should. Opinions aside, the open source movement has begun to take the world by storm.

The open source movement has produced rock solid creations from operating systems such as GNU Liunx to multi-platform software such as OpenOffice.org, Gimp, and Firefox that offer an alternative to large scale proprietary solutions. They may not have a sticker from your favorite company on the box (it may not even have a box at all), but that doesn't mean that it can't be a competitive product.

Mac OS X derives many of its roots from open source projects. The entire operating system (Darwin) is based off of older open source systems, and Apple still keeps the source code available. The stability of the system is largely in part of the pervious systems that code was taken from (BSD and Mach 3.0). Part of the reason Safari displays web sites correctly because the pages are rendered using an engine that started as an open source project (KHTML). Even this website is coming to you to you from an open source operating system (Gentoo Linux), running open source web server software (PHP, MySQL, Apache). Open source software is everywhere. You just might not have known.

Well first off, most open source products are distributed free of charge. What could possibly be better than free? Cost aside, there are still many advantages.

Anyone can come up with an idea for an application. Many people can implement these ideas and write code that will do the job. Having it written means little though. It might work, but does it work flawlessly? Does it work quickly? If everyone else in the world could take a look at the code the first person wrote, chances are one of those people might find a place to improve it. With anyone and everyone contributing to projects, good ideas tend to spread. Without being able to view other people's ideas, the entire field of computer science would expand at a much slower rate.

Open source development not only helps advance the ideas driving computer science, it also dramatically improves development time. I've made mistakes in applications that I've written. I find a lot of them. Other people, though, have e-mailed me and said, "There's a problem that I think has to do with.... I think you fix it by changing this...." It's nice when someone helps a developer find a bug, but to have other people fix them, too, shows the power of open source development.