What is Open Source Software?

The idea of open source software (also called 'Free' or 'Libre' software) is that, rather than one company developing a product on its own and protecting its exclusive rights through patents and copyrights, software can be developed more effectively by involving as many volunteer developers from around the world as possible.

Instead of a private sector team of dozens or possibly hundreds, imagine a worldwide community of millions working co-operatively to write and test software code. The result is software that is better written, more robustly tested, compliant with open (rather than proprietary) standards, and freely available for anyone to use or distribute.

Open Standards and Open Source

In working with its clients to plan web development projects, Avec Solutions always advises full compliance with agreed internet standards (HTML, XML,CSS, etc.), rather than adopting proprietary commercial technologies. As explained below, the use of these open internet standards is also the only way of achieving the related goals of website accessibility and search engine optimisation.

Further, we recommend the use of open source (see right) technologies (e.g. PHP and MySQL) wherever practical. This not only ensures the widest possible audience for the websites, but is more in keeping with the fundamental principles of not-for-profit and co-operative working. The members of Avec Solutions’ development team specialise in the open source web development platform popularly called ‘LAMP’ – Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP – which is the surest means of developing websites that are fast, robust, and based on openly agreed standards.

Avec Solutions has adopted the award-winning Joomla! content management framework for its CMS website development projects. Without placing any limitations on the design of the websites, using Joomla! CMS open source software enables the development of powerful database-driven websites without incurring any software licence fee or tying your organisation to a proprietary technology.

Using Joomla! CMS provides a powerful content management system of the kind only previously available to large organisations at a very high cost. As it is open source, overall costs are minimised and more development funds go towards creating an attractive and successful design as well as developing the different sections of the website.