We love Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) here at Dtek, and since it powers virtually everything we do, it’s crucial to our clients, too. But we don’t often have the chance to discuss it with our community, so I thought I’d write up a bit more about it here.

In the office, we use FOSS everywhere from the WordPress blog software generating the web page you’re reading now, to the OpenOffice software we use to author documents on the desktop, to the entire GNU/Linux operating system that runs on our office computers. And of course the Firefox web browser I’m using to write this is FOSS, too! As far as the services we provide, we build our web sites on a FOSS platform: from the operating system to the web server, database server, and scripting languages.

FOSS represents an entirely new model of collaborative production made possible by the advent of computer networks, and the Internet in particular. Crucially, the “F” in FOSS stands for “free” as in speech, meaning that anyone is free to see how the software works, and modify it as they’d like. (The fact that most FOSS is also “free” as in beer is nice, too!) And that’s exactly how it works: people all over the globe contribute to the development of FOSS, often making small contributions piece by piece. But the resulting software, as my examples above illustrate, can be excellent — rivaling and often surpassing similar projects produced in the more familiar, proprietary/closed manner.

It can be hard to wrap your mind around this idea and its implications at first, but it’s fascinating stuff and at the heart of our new economy and culture. At Dtek, it directly informs our professional ethos and fits our personal convictions, too. Ask us more about FOSS the next time we work together! And if you’re interested, here’s some additional reading we’d recommend:

• The Free Software Definition from the GNU Project, and the Free Software Foundation
• Open Source Initiative
• And for you economists out there, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler