The documents on this site were largely developed and refined by the readers of the Openz Open Source mailing list using the open source method of consultation - someone puts forth a "first cut" document and others engage their wisdom and perspective to polish it so that the final document reflects the best our community has to offer.

This site's content and formatting are a combination of XHTML, XML, PHP, and CSS, all 100% open source languages specified by freely available open standards for web interoperability. The content is edited with 100% open source software, and uploaded to a web server with 100% open source file transfer/compression/encryption tools. Furthermore, the computer running the web server which responded to your request to see this page is also running 100% open source software. In addition, the DNS, HTTP, and TCP/IP network protocols which allowed your computer to find us here at openz.org and helped this page of content wing its way back to your desktop whereever you are in the world are also open standards, and were implemented by the open source community. In fact, let's be clear about this: if it weren't for open source software and open standards, the Internet, email, and just about everything else of interest in the computing world... simply wouldn't be at all.

The "copyleft" and most things "GNU" (like the GNU family of free software licenses, the "GNU Project" and the Free Software Foundation) can be credited to Richard Stallman (aka RMS - his personal site is worth a visit). Without his uncompromising idealism, very little of the framework we now call "open source" (unfortunately, to his dismay - but we do have our reasons) would exist. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds, the primary developer of the Linux kernel. If Linus hadn't had the unselfish vision to make his "little project" (Linux) available under RMS's GPL license, I suspect we here at Openz wouldn't have much of a story to tell. In years to come, I have no doubt both men will be seen by the rest of the world as the heroes we know them to be. All credit, RMS, Linus and your many friends.

Anyone who wants a much more comprehensive history of open source and its many characters should find a copy of Glyn Moody's superb Rebel Code. It's a jolly good read.

This page and much of the content of this site is copyleft by David Lane on behalf of Openz, 2001-2002. I didn't do it all myself - many thanks to my colleagues in the Effusion Group: Damien Bateman (Egressive), who wrote a lot (if not most) of the PHP code that makes up the site's framework, Josh Campbell (ZYPE) who came up with the Openz logo, a lot of the site graphics, and provided guidance on interface matters, Richard Waid and Brian Chatterton (iOpen Technologies) who provided sage advice and crash testing along with Andrew Groom (Aphid). Thanks also to the bunch at NZOSS, especially Peter Harrison, whose energy and effectiveness have been an inspiration from the start. I'm sure these credits will extend to other contributors as well in the near future.

Thanks also to Jamie Baddeley (ViewPoint Consulting) who took up the role of site news coordinator in 2003!

Anyone interested in reproducing content on this site is welcome to do so under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. If you would like to contribute to this effort, please join the Openz Open Source mailing list - to do so, send a blank message to opensource-subscribe@openz.org. Thanks for your interest.