Most of the information available in this book, and the examples presented as exercises, have one thing in common: the fact that they are freely available for anyone to access. This book tries to offer guidance to you on how to interact with existing and freely available packages that could help an embedded engineer, such as you, and at the same time, also try to arouse your curiosity to learn more.

The main advantage of open source is represented by the fact that it permits developers to concentrate more on their products and their added value. Having an open source product offers access to a variety of new possibilities and opportunities, such as reduced costs of licensing, increased skills, and knowledge of a company. The fact that a company uses an open source product that most people have access to, and can understand its working, implies budget savings. The money saved could be used in other departments, such as hardware or acquisitions.

Usually, there is a misconception about open source having little or no control over a product. However, the opposite is true. The open source system, in general, offers full control over software, and we are going to demonstrate this. For any software, your open source project resides on a repository that offers access for everyone to see. Since you're the person in charge of a project, and its administrator as well, you have all the right in the world to accept the contributions of others, which lends them the same right as you, and this basically gives you the freedom to do whatever you like. Of course, there could be someone who is inspired by your project and could do something that is more appreciated by the open source community. However, this is how progress is made, and, to be completely honest, if you are a company, this kind of scenario is almost invalid. Even in this case, this situation does not mean the death of your project, but an opportunity instead. Here, I would like to present the following quote:

Allowing access to others, having external help, modifications, debugging, and optimizations performed on your open source software implies a longer life for the product and better quality achieved over time. At the same time, the open source environment offers access to a variety of components that could easily be integrated in your product if there's a requirement for them. This permits a quick development process, lower costs, and also shifts a great deal of the maintenance and development work from your product. Also, it offers the possibility to support a particular component to make sure that it continues to suit your needs. However, in most instances, you would need to take some time and build this component for your product from zero.

This brings us to the next benefit of open source, which involves testing and quality assurance for our product. Besides the lesser amount of work that is needed for testing, it is also possible to choose from a number of options before deciding which components fits best for our product. Also, it is cheaper to use open source software, than buying and evaluating proprietary products. This takes and gives back process, visible in the open source community, is the one that generates products of a higher quality and more mature ones. This quality is even greater than that of other proprietary or closed source similar products. Of course, this is not a generally valid affirmation and only happens for mature and widely used products, but here appears the term community and foundation into play.

In general, open source software is developed with the help of communities of developers and users. This system offers access to a greater support on interaction with the tools directly from developers - the sort of thing that does not happen when working with closed source tools. Also, there is no restriction when you're looking for an answer to your questions, no matter whether you work for a company or not. Being part of the open source community means more than bug fixing, bug reporting, or feature development. It is about the contribution added by the developers, but, at the same time, it offers the possibility for engineers to get recognition outside their working environment, by facing new challenges and trying out new things. It can also be seen as a great motivational factor and a source of inspiration for everyone involved in the process.

Instead of a conclusion, I would also like to present a quote from the person who forms the core of this process, the man who offered us Linux and kept it open source: