Any software which has its source code made available and modest to the whole is said to be open source software , with the following concerns.

• The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

• The freedom to study, change and access source code.

• The freedom to share and copy.

• The freedom to improve and redistribute.

We are in need of open source software because, the software which we attain from merchandise has a tariff and is limited on usage, no copies could be made legally and no means to share . but in case of an open source software, you face no barriers when compared to a software which has a tariff. In this era of technology, open source software is an emerging and a growing phenomenon, when compared with other.

The concept of open source came into existence, when the developers community and hacker community wanted to change the ways of doing things. So they took something new in the growing world of computing and software development. These group of peoples proposed a term “open source” from then. The open source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code, later the peoples called it the free software movement, but in a meeting held at pal alto, California Mr . Peterson suggested the word “open source” and many efforts were made to popularize the term till then peoples called it by many names,so a public call was made by the software community to adopt a universal name and as a result on this on February 1998 the open source initiative was formed by Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens.

In the same year of 1998 in the month of April an event was organized by Tim o Reilly which was called as the free ware summit later it was also known as the open source summit open source software has never managed to put down the word free software but it gave birth to the free and open software or the FOSS. Based on the FOSS concept we have many applications and operating systems both the stable and the unstable versions are available to the end users and developers.

When the outside world began to speak of open source software .some companies wanted to have their name on the history so they began to develop a open source software to the public and it was the Netscape communications corporation. The actual free software was a Internet suite ,in 1996 a beta version of it was made and again in June 1997 another version was made and later on 1998 the Netscape communicator 4.5 was released to the public as a free software under the Netscape public license. This code seems to be the mother of Mozilla fire fox and thunder bird and is released under Mozilla public license. Later in august 1999 Sun Micro systems were the second to release the free software named as the star office under the gnu lesser general public license and as advanced they released the OpenOffice.org.

Before the open source movement .during the 1980’s itself techs began to thing of developing a operating system of their own .as a result of that The first open source free software originated at the Massachusetts institute of technology as an collaboration by Jim Gettys and Bob Scheifler in the year 1984 under the name X window systems it was a standard window system with a basic environment of graphical user interface. X is an architecture independent operating system for remote GUI and input device compatibilities. Thus X is server based operating system and provides network transparency .