Open Source for Surrey
Open Source for Surrey is a campaign to educate local businesses, government, educational institutions and voluntary sector organisations about the benefits of adopting open systems and open source software.
We believe adopting open systems has a number of benefits including:
- Open systems promote organisational accountability through open governance.
- Open systems allow information to be more accessible
- Open systems consistently deliver higher levels of security and stability than proprietary solutions
- Open systems often have comparable or lower costs of deployment and maintenance
- Open systems are more open - which reduces risk as you are less locked in to suppliers and software companies' offerings
In times when we are all under pressure to deliver more with a limited budget, we believe that open systems provide a route to provide considerably more in terms of functionality whilst gaining cost savings in your organisation.
What do "Open Systems" mean?
Open Systems are systems built with open source software. Open source software is software that has a licence that grants everyone a right to use, change and improve the software. As software is developed by people primarily orientated to serve a community - the software often adopts or implements open standards which makes it easier to integrate that system with other systems providing transparency of your organisational data.
What can "Open Systems" do?
We find software in many consumer devices including our computers, mobile phones, televisions and even our toasters. You will find a choice of software for in many areas built on open systems. For example, you can use open source software to:
- run and manage content on your website
- run your tills and to your business accounts
- run your phone systems and mobile phone
- to navigate for you whilst driving, riding a bike or walking
Where can I find open software?
Open source software is usually developed in a community model and is free for people to use as long as they respect certain rights of the developers - such as attributing their work. There is no budget in these organisations for marketing as they do not charge you licence fees like proprietary suppliers. As a result, you need to know where to look to find open source software and that's where Open Surrey can help you - in guiding you to the software that will deliver you a solution for your organisational or individual need.