Our Vision

Our Vision of Open Source

Open source is above all a a way of thinking based on values of freedom,respect, social responsibility and openness. As citizens, we are all attached to these values. With these values we associate transparency, reliability, an appreciation for the service provided as well as technical expertise, and a simple, useful and high performing vision of IT systems.

From a financial standpoint, the distribution of open source solutions is a strength for improving our economy in general, providing our companies with major productivity gains which contribute to making them perform better and become more profitable. We do not think however that proprietary software should be condemned. It has a purpose and has produced some quality products. But in the IT field, we notice that premiums are initially so high that it quickly leads to a monopoly situation or oligopolies that stifle competition and innovation, and in the end cost companies a lot of money.

Open Source solutions are on the other hand open, robust and always respect standards for interoperability. This offer becomes larger and more advanced every year, and today covers all areas from infrastructure, frameworks and development tools, CMS, portals, Business Intelligence, CRM, GED, e-commerce and even ERP.

Smile continually monitors each of these areas in order to build a large base of expertise covering a wide variety of solutions. , which are available for free and have already been downloaded more than 80000 times. An insight into this expertise is provided through our White Papers

For those who want to learn more about Open Source and free software, we suggest taking a look at our work entitled "Introduction to Open Source and free software ," which outlines the various aspects of this movement: historical, philosophical, licensing, economic models, support models and development.

It is clear that designers, developers and integrators do well for themselves and open source is not normally free. But open source solutions often provide good value for money. It is one of the reasons why their use in companies is rapidly growing. It isn't however the only reason. Open Source solutions are distributed on a very large scale and therefore quickly become very strong. Because they bring together large groups of users, they have an unrivalled development process. And because they are less concerned with purely commercial issues, they are more likely to last for a long time. Open source is not only community orientated. There are three major families of open source solutions: products from major establishments (Apache, Linux, Eclipse, Mozilla, ...), community products and products from editors. The open source community is just as lively as ever, but the last few years have seen the arrival of many new open source editors with a business model that is often based on support. Smile is partnered with a large number of these editors.

At Smile, we regularly pass on the contributions we make to products that we integrate and developments financed by our clients for their needs are integrated into products each time they have a more general use. For example, the Eclipse plugin produced by Smile is used by eZ Publish developpers all over the world. In 2008 our client INA financed important developments to the Business Intelligence tool Spago BI. Smile has provided many precious plug ins to the tools Typo3 and eZ Publish. And Smile also manages special open source projects, for example the Magento-OpenERP connector, that links the leader for open source e-commerce tools with the one of the best ERP, or the Web Assemble Tool, a powerful tool which is both a content aggregator and a cache manager. .

Smile is a member of APRIL, The association that promotes the defense of free software.. Smile is also a member of PLOSS, the association that brings together free companies in the Ile de France region .