Javier's blog: Open Source Initiative (OSI)

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit global corporation that intends to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community and promote the use of open source software.

But first of all, what is open source software? The open source software are programs that are free to the public and that can be used by anyone. In other words, they do not have a private license, therefore they are perfectly legal because they are public and free. The definition used in the web Webopedia is the following: Open source refers to a program or software in which the source code (the form of the program when a programmer writes a program in a particular programming language) is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design free of charge.

There are open source programs of all kinds: text editors, for creating presentations, for calculations, desktop publishers, to draw, and even to being able to create animated images.

There is an incredibly extended list of open source programs but among this list we can find the most commonly known and used: Open Office, Google Sketch Up, Scribus, Scratch, and many more.