A new Forfas report gives guidelines to both new and established Irish software companies for getting products to market quickly and growing market share by taking advantage of the open source model of software development.

The market for open source software is growing rapidly, making many companies think seriously about it, said Michele Quinn, director of the Irish Software Association. "As a revenue model and a business model it is really changing the way companies do business, " she said. The report "highlights another avenue for companies to explore."

"If they can cut down their cost of delivery and time to market by being able to use open source, that all starts to make commercial sense, " said Jennifer Condon, manager of Enterprise Ireland's software and emerging services division.

Open source software developers make their source program code freely available to the general public, allowing users to view it, make changes and build new versions of it without paying a licence fee. The Firefox internet browser, for example, is an open source product. So, too, is the Linux operating system for PCs and Apache servers. Both packages are credited with fuelling the growth of the worldwide web itself.

Open source software (OSS) developers usually make money through product service, royalty payments and subscription fees for software updates. With proprietary software, such as Microsoft's Windows operating system, the developer generates revenues by charging licence fees to each user up-front.

"We expect that embracing OSS will become fundamental to building and maintaining market share in the future, " said Forfas chief executive, Martin Cronin.