The Linux Foundation has published an ebook to help businesses understand open source. The electronic publication is designed for executives to understand how open source can help their businesses and most importantly, the content is available for free.
With growing number of organisations exploring open source software, it has become necessary for them to establish processes for this community-driven offering. The Linux Foundation realised this need of educating business executives about open source ecosystem, software, its benefits and various open source licenses and thus brought Open Source Software Basics as its very first ebook.
“The benefits of adopting and contributing back to open source are immense, but more education is required to fully realise those advantages. Initiatives such as the Open Source Software Basics publication are part of the Linux Foundation’s effort to increase accessibility to such education,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of Linux Foundation, in a statement.
The free publication includes topics like what is open source software (OSS), why do companies use OSS, why is OSS faster, lower cost and more flexible, operational challenges to using OSS and OSS licenses. Moreover, the ebook is primarily targeted towards business executives, legal team, software developers, product managers and software architects.
Text version of existing course
Most of the content in the ebook is derived from The Linux Foundation’s basic “LFC210 – Fundamentals of Professional Open Source Management” training course. It mentions plenty of reasons why organisations should adopt to open source. Some of the key benefits mentioned in the book are compelling for an explorer to completely adapt to open source.
If you are confused about the practicality of open source for your business, you should go through the book to understand if open source can help your company. You can download the ebook from The Linux Foundation’s website.
Link goes to a free chapter download, not an entire ebook.