~Promote & Develop Interest for Other People to Use Open Source Software~

### Unlike proprietary off-the-shelf software, which comes with restrictive copyright licenses, open-source software can be given away for no charge. This means that its creators cannot require each user to pay a license fee to fund development. Instead, a number of alternative models for funding its development have emerged.

###  Launch pad provides repository hosting, use it even if you're not hosting anything else there.

###  Blog about your software, show screenshots. People love screenshots.

###  Hire a designer to make a distinctive style sheet.

###  Pay lots of attention to the web design of your site. Be stylish, it really helps.

###  Launch advertisement that shows the advantages of Open Source Software to the public.

###  Provides free courses to students or lecturers to explain how to use the software. For example : OpenOffice.

###  The software developer should be facilitating the installation of all the ways Open Source software so people do not experience difficulty.

###  Software can be developed as a consulting project for one or more customers. The customers pay to direct the developers efforts : to have bugs prioritized and fixed or features added. Companies or independent consultants can also charge for training, installation, technical support, or customization of the software.

###  Another approach to funding is to provide the software freely, but sell licenses to proprietary add-ons such as data libraries. For instance, an open-source CAD program may require parts libraries which are sold on a subscription or flat-fee basis. Open-source software can also promote the sale of specialized hardware that it interoperates with, as in the case of the Asterisk telephony software, developed by a manufacturer of PC telephony hardware.

Suggestion name(link) of blog and forums that discuss about Open Source : 

http://www.cmsreview.com/Forums/OpenSource.html

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source?tag=mantle_skin;content

http://www.phpbb.com/

http://www.opensourceinitiative.net/

http://vanillaforums.org/

~History of Open Source~

 

>>>  Open Source Software (OSS) is a computer software that is available in source code form the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.

>>>  Open Source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Open source software is the most prominent example of an open source development and often compared to (technically defined) user-generated content or (legally defined) open content movements.

>>>  The free software movement was launched in 1983. In 1998, a group of individuals advocated that the term free software should be replaced by open source software(OSS) as an expression which is less ambiguous and more comfortable for the corporate world. Software developers may want to publish their software with an open source license, so that anybody may also develop the same software or understand its internal functioning. Open source software generally allows anyone to create modifications of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or, in some cases, market it. Scholars Casson and Ryan have pointed out several policy-based reasons for adoption of open source, in particular, the heightened value proposition from open source (when compared to most propriety formats) in the following categories : 

•  Security
• Affordability
• Transparency
• Perpetuity
• Interoperability
• Localization