Open Source is a set of principles and practices, that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge ie. source code.

Open Source enables Community access to important software products

The Internet, World Wide Web (www), NCSA Mosaic, Firefox browser, Apache webserver, PostgreSql database, Sendmail program, KDE desktop environment, X window, Open Office, Linux kernel, BSD* OS and many others are important software products and technologies that comes from the Open Source community.

Open Source empowers Community

The access to source code and community interaction leveraged on internet, has promoted behavioural norms that enable many programmers around the world to participate in a widely distributed and loosely coordinated innovation process.

Open Source is Innovation Friendly.

Users can contribute more than ideas: they can take the source code for a software product and transform it to work better or even provide entirely new functionality.

Open Source is the Moore's Law for Software

With change being a constant theme and the market changing every 18 months, the half-life of software is significantly reduced and subject to fast commoditization.

Open Source speeds up value creation

Addressing new opportunities and Service lines for the customers is a strategic goal for Organizations whether for-profit or not-for-profit. Open Source solution stacks are helping organizations deliver services and products that solve real world problems with significant cost advantages.

An excerpt from the Open Source Initiative (OSI) website -

"When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing" !

Further Reading

Open Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

Open Source Initiative
http://www.opensource.org/