It's useful for everybody - for those who create and those who use it. The main principle - to share the knowledge, instead of reinventing the bike, spending plenty of time for it and trying to hide this personal or group achievement from the others.

Of course, it can seem much more efficient if, after dedicating much resources for your creation, you'll allow others to access it only for a certain price. However, in the broader thinking, becomes obvious, that it's much more worth to share the information and to improve the already created product together.

For the companies, which promote the open source principle, and whose product is accessible to everybody, this way of acting is also useful, since all the users, by having the possibility to use and change it for free, often become the developers of the product, so the need of the hired professionals is decreased. Since the "offshore" developers must commit their improvements to the project mainstream, everybody is informed about the improvements and the product boosts, but still remains open for further changes, which means, that the evolution occures.

 

Such "open" communities are alternative to those comanies, which work following the "closure" or "privacy " principle, when a created product is accessible only for those who buy a license to use the program. It's further independent developement from the user side is impossible. Product's improvements are realised just by closed teams of professionals and the users must pay money for the installation. Since often for the end user any other choice is noticed, such "create - don't share" principle works successfully in the world and crowds of users follow it. On the other hand, the alternative open source community occupies a huge part of the market and is starting to expand in Lithuania as well.

The open source's mission - to help to create a society, which is not afraid of sharing, because perceives in it lots of conveniences:

• democracy, because users are not depending on one company. Many companies, which have initiated the deelopment of some open source product once, do not announce themselves as the owners. (Since every user has the possibility to change a product, to avoid the anarchy and to guarantee the stability of the developement, there's always a moderator, set by the initiators of the project. He/she is like a minimal filter, which does not allow the wrong or illogical changes to reach the product);

• every open source product evolves according to the society's needs - and no matter how would some company decide to change it;

• more economical - there is no need to buy a program and many other separated/additional improvements or other supplements. Therefore, comparing to the products, based on a "closed source" the monetary investment in the open source products ir marke relevantly lower.