It's simply overwhelming, the level of adoption within businesses—large and small—of open source software... the OSI can help!
The OSI helps businesses understand, adopt, contribute to and benefit from open source software, development practices and communities.
The open source model has a lot to offer the business world: both as consumers and contributors. While the most frequently cited benefit is lower total cost of ownership, many other benefits exist that enhance a businesses' return on any open source software investment.
Participating in open source projects and communities is a way to build open standards as actual software, rather than paper documents. It's a way for companies and individuals to collaborate around shared needs on a product that none of them could achieve alone or, in and of itself, does not constitute a key business differentiator. It's a better development model where bug-fixes and new features identified by your customers are done more quickly and with higher quality, yielding increased reliability..
The open source model also enables increased security; because code is in the public view it will be exposed to extreme scrutiny, with problems being found and fixed instead of being kept secret until the wrong person discovers them. And last but not least, it's a way that the little guys can get together, innovate and have a good chance at beating a monopoly.
Benefits of open source software
Here's what the OSI is doing to promote awareness and adoption of open source software
- Support of Stack Exchange in development of licensing and distribution for code/content
- Development of open source licensing directory for integration with crowd-driven platforms ranging from Github to Kickstarter