What Is Open Source?

You’ve probably heard this term thrown around on the web, most likely intermingled with mentions of Joomla, Mambo, or Drupal. And if you host your own blog, you might be very familiar with WordPress, TypePad, or b2Evolution.

What do these software packages have in common? They are all open source.

This means that they are freely distributed applications that you can use to deploy your own website. (Some other open source products include Mozilla Firefox, Linux, and Apache.)

Given the time and effort that goes into developing and maintaining these programs, you might be wondering why anyone would invest so much time without any obvious compensation.

Why Would Anyone Release Open Source Software?

Believe it or not, open source is a development methodology that enables feature-rich applications to be built.

By opting to release free software, developers can attract a large pool or users, which has many benefits. First, developers will receive lots of input and feedback which can be used to improve the application. Second, other developers will be drawn to the project and lend their own expertise both in terms of core functionality and plugins. And third, the community of users may support the project via donations or requests for paid assistance.

As a result, open source applications are often well funded and very robust in terms of functionality. Additionally, they generally stay abreast of the changing needs of their users.

Can Money Be Made With Open Source?

While open source applications are distributed free of charge, this does not mean that no one is making money. Developers generate an income via advertisements, sponsors, and donations. Additionally, custom integrations and plugins for big clients might also fetch a fair price.

You might also see multiple versions of a product. Some open source applications, for example, feature a free version and a fully-featured version.

Still, some application developers make money by hosting your website or by providing paid product support.

Velvet Blues Supports Open Source!

We are big fans of open source software. While we do develop our own custom content management systems from time to time, open source applications do have their benefits. Probably the most important benefit is that these packages enable us to meet very short deadlines. These also enables us to deliver dynamic feature-rich websites at reasonable prices.

Stay tuned for our upcoming plugin releases. We have decided to give back to the open source community by releasing a few of the plugins that we have developed for our clients.

Update: We just released the Update URLs plugin for WordPress. We regularly move blogs to new domains or new directories. This plugin greatly simplifies the process and eliminates the need to manually run queries in the database.