Here at Indau we pride ourselves on our support of the open source software community. But what is Open Source software?

Open source software is software that is free, but not necessarily free as in cost - but free as in freedom. Freedom to modify and distribute. Software where the source code is made available for others to modify and use and redistribute. Whilst there are many different licenses that cover open source software, this is in essence the basis for the open source community. To find out more about open source software you can visit the open source initiative (OSI) at http://www.opensource.org where you can find out about the different types of licenses and the criteria that need to be met to provide open source code under an OSI license.

The DeeEmm CMS (DMCMS) open source web content management software project that this site uses is developed and maintained by us here at Indau. We provide the DeeEmm CMS software free under the terms of the GPL License, which allows others to modify and make derivative works based on our source code.

At Indau, not only does the Indau website utilise an open source software package to manage its content. Our support of the open source community also extends to our choice of operating system. We exclusively use Linux for all of our desktop, laptop and server computers, In fact, we try to utilise open source software wherever we can.

Why Open Source?

Here at Indau we actively support the open source software community. Our commitment in providing and maintaining the DeeEmm CMS package as a free to use, open source software package helps us to address the balance with the other open source software that we use. We feel that as we are in a position to contribute to the open source community - we should, we also encourage others in the same position to do the same.

As well as contributing to the open source community, we also, almost exclusively, use open source software for our day to day business operations. Not only is this software free to use, it also has a much higher level of suppport that the more traditional solutions and we find that it is more than stable enough to suit our needs.

With a majority market share of commercially utilised storage servers and mail servers running open source operating systems, as well as the open source programming language PHP being the most widely used web based programming language, we feel that open source operating systems such as Linux are a much better alternative to the more traditionally used products, and for this reason we exclusively use Linux on all of our machines.

Our particular favoured version of Linux is Ubuntu - in our opinion a more accessible version of Linux. We found that Ubuntu made the transition from a Windows envoironment relatively easy due to the excellent support community. The spirit of which is also echoed in the meaning of the word Ubuntu - ''I am what I am because of who we all are'

We can reccommend Ubuntu as our choice for open source operating system and find that the bundled open office package performs very well within the microsoft dominated world of office software Thats why you will find the Ubuntu logo on the bottom of our webpage - we use it and endorse it - If Ubuntu are happy to provide thier software for free then we are happy to advertise it for free.