Before you can understand our offering you must first have an idea on how Open Source Software works, especially from a business and economic point of view.

Simply put, Open Source Software is software that is available for free on the Internet. It is also called Free Software, although this later term has raised controversy in the past, especially in Corporate America, where it's sometimes hard to differentiate the term “Free as in Freedom” versus “Free as in Beer”. The term Free Software refers to Free as in Freedom, and in this context it is basically the same as Open Source.

What makes Open Source or Free Software such, is the license by which it is released to clients and the general public (sometimes the term Public Domain Software may also be used to refer to the same thing). Open Source and Free Software Licenses come in a wide variety of options, but in the end most (if not all) of the licenses are based on the same Intellectual Property Rights just as any other traditional software. The difference is that Open Source Software uses the Copyright system to ensure the freedoms of the final consumer instead of limiting them.

Traditional Software is sold as a product, but in reality what you actually “buy” is a License to use that software, not the software itself. For example, when you buy a TV or an Automobile, you actually own the object (product) as do with it as you please. You can take it apart, see how it works, sell it, rent it, paint it and change it in any way, and basically use it in any way you want. This does not hold true for most common software. Not only are you not buying a product, but the use is limited to whatever the license allows you to. For example, you may not copy it and share it with friends, you can't see the internals (source code), see how it works, and in many cases you can't change in any way, except for what is allowed by the software license (use it in one particular way).

The following table illustrates the differences between an Open Source license and a Closed Sourced one:

As you can see, closed and open source are both just software, and mostly do the same thing. The difference is basically the license. In Open Source you have the same freedoms you have with any product you buy; with closed source on the other hand, you are limited and supervised (note 1) by the owning company to use the software as they intend. Furthermore, if the software has a defect or you want to enhance or adapt it to your needs, you must always remain at the mercy of the copyright owner. Many people take this for granted, but the information processed and contained in your computers today does not actually belong to them (note 2).

Open Source and Free Software licenses come basically in two major flavors: The FSF Approved Licenses (Free Software Foundation), and the OSI Approved Licenses (Open Software Initiative). The FSF criteria is that Free Software must remain Free forever and can never be closed, or even bundled with closed source solutions; their main license is the GPL (General Public License) and they also provide a Lesser License (LGPL) which allows for Free Software libraries to link with non-free software.

The OSI criteria on the other hand, does not provide an OSI license per-se, but instead they define a set of criteria that a license must have, in order for a software to be considered “Open Source”. In all, there are probably a few dozen different Open Source and Free Software licenses in use today. Many of them are very similar with little and specific changes, and usually deriving directly from the mainstream licenses: GPL, BSD and MIT.
As a side note, it is interesting to point out that Free and Open Source Software has sparked some interesting initiatives in other Intellectual Property arenas such as music and knowledge in general. An interesting example is the Creative Commons intiative: http://creativecommons.org

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Notes:

1. For example, many software today are network-aware and will automatically connect to their owning company's site to verify if you are using a legal copy of the software. Users agree to these things when they click “I Agree” on the license agreements, and agree to other things as well, for example, for the software to send “usage” information such as what web pages and sites you visit on your web browser. As many should know, the big software companies are forced by law to share this information with government agencies, so in the end when you use closed source software you may be, for exaample, agreeing for the government to eavesdrop your computer.
2. Closed software also comes with closed formats for information interchange, and many of these formats are patented. This means that your information lives inside a binary format that belongs to a company and not yourself. In many situations you may not even export this information into other formats that would free you from continuing to use only one software provider. Such tactics are well known in most technology industries and it's called “vendor lock-in”. Users of technology have always fought this by continually lobbying for “standards” (ANSI, ISA, ISO, etc.). Open Source software is purely based on Open Standards to guarantee that the final user is not “locked-in” to a particular software, but rather has the freedom to choose amongst the many offerings, promoting competition, natural selection and avoiding monopoly. This is why in Open Source, you may have a lot more diversity and a lot less monolithic offerings, which in turn may intimidate some users; the business of Yabarana is to help it's customers through this very broad and sometimes complex world of Open Source.