Typically when people organize around an open source project they are asking “the crowd” to develop, review, test and document programing code. In software this works particularly well. Once developed each copy of software has low marginal cost and, in contrast to proprietary solutions, anyone can make a copy and modify to their own need. This means that open source is not only gives you the freedom to change the software but is free of licensing cost because it is owned by the group rather then a company.
