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Many people and business misinterpreted the term ‘free’ in free software thinking free as in zero cost (Gallego et al. , 2008). Some of the people realised that there was problem with the term ‘Free Software’. They wanted people and business to understand the idea that the software was open and the source code was available. So Eric Raymond, Larry Augustin, Michael Tiemann and some other member set up a meeting and came up with the concept of the term ‘Open Source’ (Open Source Initiative, n.d. a; Revolution OS, 2002; Gallego et al. , 2008). Eric Raymond jointly with Bruce Perens in 1998 went on to found the Open Source Initiative (Open Source Initiative, n.d. a).  Open source doesn’t only mean that the source code is open, but it is the kind of software which gives the users 10 rights which is mentioned in the Open Source definition: ·          The software can be freely redistributed to someone else. ·    ...

GNU/Linux Operating system opened a wider window of opportunity to the ICT and has came a long way from its origin.  GNU/Linux became popular and widely accepted in the past decade (Gillen et al., 2008; Gillen, 2009). This system came along with some of the preferred features than its competitors and gained most of the market. It came with variety of cost and support options giving the organisations more option to choose from. The GNU/Linux related software, hardware and support had more than 21 billion dollar revenue in 2007 and this figure is expected to be more than double by 2011 (Gillen et al., 2008). It has been a fastest growing operating system in almost every category of computing. It is growing fast in enterprise level too mostly because it is the way to control cost (Zemlin, n.d.). GNU/Linux is one of the most technically powerful operating system. It supports more than 20 different hardware architectures and has also been known for its high performance computing (...

Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit organisation which develops Free Software’s and advocates the software freedoms and software user right. It is a community of ethical programmers who have contributed their time and effort so that rest of the society can enjoy the freedom software has to offer (Brown, 2010). Free software gives users the freedom and benefits that proprietary software doesn’t (Lee, 2010). The term free in Free Software refers to liberty (like ‘Libre’ in French), and not the cost like free as in free speech and not free as in free beer. The freedoms are to make changes or hire someone else to make changes to meet the unique needs, to redistribute copies, to share with other people, and to make improvements and publish them so that other people can enjoy the benefit too. Free Software provides the users with four essential freedom: Freedom 0 which gives the user freedom to run the software for any purpose, Freedom 1 which gives the user freedom to view ...