OSS methodology is much different from traditional methods of production. Rather than a top-down, organized company creating a product that is then sold retail with the ultimate goal of making profit, open-source methodology is a collaborative environment in which anybody can use, modify, and redistribute a program that includes its source code. Rather than working as a paid programmer for a large company like Microsoft, OSS production takes place on websites like sourceforge.net (linked in Innovation and Functionality), where anybody can participate in the creation of software. This production can be driven by an OSS company such as Mozilla, contracted by a company in need of a certain type of software, or initiated by an individual and worked on by random independent programmers. The motivation for working on such projects (often not for pay) can be to fill a shared need, to gain notoriety and advance career, or simply for the joy of accomplishment, which one study found was the primary motivation for independent programmers ssrn.com. It is a functional methodology built primarily on non-economic motivating factors; the goal is not to make a buck but to contribute to the production a useful product.

This idea of non-profit hive mentality production that defines open source is quickly becoming a new paradigm in modern society. The success of open source methodology in software is evident just by the simple fact that it has been taken from software and used in other avenues. Wikipedia is an example of an open-source encyclopedia, the success of which is undeniable. Science has taken notice in recent years, and many essays such as this Jstor.org have explored the advantages of employing open-source methodology in scientific research. The Innovation and Functionality section discusses the ways in which open source methodology has allowed for massive amounts of software production and innovation with comparable and in some cases superior functionality to similar proprietary software.

In some ways this collaborative means of production works on its own. Because of the aforementioned philosophical and personal motivations, a large, peer-reviewing group of programmers can regulate each other and create a functional finished product. However, to make sure the free nature of the process is not violated, the process is protected with what is known as “copyleft” licenses, a play on the traditional copyright license. Copyleft licenses protect the basic tenets of open-source software laid out by the Open Source Initiative linked to in the Intro Opensource.org, meaning that when modifying and redistributing a person has to adhere to the original author’s methods, usually meaning they have to provide the source code and make it available to everyone. A list of OSS licenses is here Opensource.org. Thus, the integrity of the process is kept, and there is still some leeway for how exactly to license the product to allow for functional Business Models.

The object of this page is to show that OSS is not, as popularly believed, a wild west unregulated crap shoot, but rather an organized, diverse, purposeful process that has been honed in order to effectively create the most quality software products with an open source methodology.