We believe in the use and creation of open source software and data for various reasons.
First of all, the availability of the source code and the right to modify it is very important. It enables the unlimited tuning and improvement of a software product, by whoever is best at the job. To really extend the lifetime of an application, it must be available in source form. Source code availability also makes it much easier to isolate bugs, and (for a programmer) to fix them.
The right to redistribute modifications and improvements to the code, and to reuse other open source code, permits all the advantages due to the modifiability of the software to be shared by large communities.
The right to use the software in any way. This, combined with redistribution rights, ensures (if the software is useful enough), a large population of users, which helps in turn to build up a market for support and customization of the software, which can only attract more and more developers to work in the project. This in turn helps to improve the quality of the product
No ``black boxes'' are possible. This point is so important that open source is now considered by many experts as one of the necessary conditions for dependable applications.
Many of our software projects result in open source software. See below logos of some of the open source software frequently used in our projects
