What is Open Source?

Open Source Software is software that is released under a license in which a copyright holder grans users the rights to study, change, and distribute it to anyone and for any purpose. The source code is available for inspection, modification, and enhancement.

Open Source software is normally developed in public in a collaboration manor.  Licences are normally published in under open-source licences such as GPL3 / GNU so that anyone can develop the same software. Open source software provides:

Security
Affordability
Transparency
Interoperability
Scalability
Localisation

Open-Source initiative 

OSD is a document which defines whether a software can be labelled with the open-source certification mark.

How much does Open-Source cost?

Normally open source is free or has a minimal cost, but like any other proprietary software there can be other costs such as technical support, training, administrative costs, or maintenance. Open-Source products were also known as public domain, academics and researchers released most of the software back in the early days based on openness, collaboration / cooperation, and was not seen as a commodity that could be bought and sold for profit. This communal behaviour became a central element in the so-called hacking culture. The term hacking in this instance is a positive amongst open-source programmers, and not in the sense you see today in movies. The readable form of the source-code would normally be released with the compiled code, so that users could modify the source code to their liking because it maybe would not run on different hardware or operating systems. Open-source code allows programmers to add new features and fix bugs in the code, which is essential especially regarding security fixes. 

Opensource Software vs Proprietary Software.

Long after the advent of computers, industry started to adopt the power of computing and advancing its technologies even further, as such new software and hardware needed to be developed to meet increasing demand. This had a large cost to produce the software and the growing software industry had to start competing with the growing hardware manufacturers, because the hardware manufacturers were bundling the software with the hardware. To increase revenues and to keep up with the rising costs in software development a general trend began to occur were we know longer distributed source-code openly, but instead we decided to make it proprietary where One would need to acquire a licence in order to use the software legally to install a copy on your hardware system. However there has been a open-source software re-insurgence in research and alternatives to lower costs of using and maintaining computer systems by resurrecting this idea of free open-source software. Open-source software developers had to find a way to continually develop software while allowing it to remain free. Some of these developers resorted to private funding, crowdfunding or even donations to keep their projects alive. Some have even commercialised their software, this means they start striking partnerships with other companies to show advertisements or install other software within their open-source software, this allows their open source to be funded, while allowing the end-user to keep using their software freely. So, one way or another funding must occur whether it is a proprietary software like Microsoft or open-source software like Linux, software developers.