Abstract--The writing is based on literature study obtained from books and white papers and personal interview with several practitioners, governmental policy makers and students. Past experiences tells that open development or similar concept of activity helped improve a product and gave maximum benefit to the community. Open development of computer software leads to production of open source software (OSS). Embracing OSS helps promote the use of legal software, encourage the production and improvement of available OSS, educate students to good programming techniques, raise the knowledge of students on computer and operating systems, and promote the construction of community that shares and cares. The study concludes that embracing open source software is the best way to empower public potentials. Index Terms--community, culture, development, open source software I. NOMENCLATURE Open source software (OSS) are computer programs that are developed openly by a group of programmers or by the community. Openness in this context can mean that everybody in the world can look into the program code, may contribute to the development, may modify, distribute and sell the software. There are a bunch of licensing models for open source software including the popular GPL (General Public Licence). These licences are applied to ensure that OSS and their derivatives will always be open. II. OPEN SOURCE AND OPEN DEVELOPMENT HE concept of open source and open development deals with practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials by interested parties. Within the same concept, open source software can be regarded as software that allow people to look into the source code and give contribution to the development and implementation of the software. Opening the source code of a product enabled a self- enhancing diversity of production models and interactive communities [1]. Members of the community may study the source code and repeat the experience, modify the procedure and do their own experiments and share the results. Those who is new to the field may learn quickly and may later contribute. History tells how open development or similar concept of activity helped improve the quality of products and gave H. Thamrin is with Dept. of Informatics, Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, Jl. A Yani 1 Pabelan Kartasura Surakarta 57102 Indonesia (e-mail: husni@fki.ums.ac.id). maximum benefit to the community. In paper [2], Robert C. Allen presented a detailed case study of technical improvement in the iron industry of Cleveland, United Kingdom during the period of 1850 to 1870. It should be noted that in the period, patenting policy had already been adopted by many countries but the community of Cleveland iron industry developed a model of innovation, which is labelled by Allen as collective invention. Cleveland iron producers freely disclosed to their competitors technical information concerning the construction details and performance of the blast furnaces they had installed. Information was normally shared both through formal and informal channels, such as scientific seminars, talks, site visit and personal communication. New technical knowledge was not protected using patents so that competing firms could freely make use of the released information when they had to construct a new blast furnace. The consequence of this process of information sharing was that the blast furnaces of the district increased their performance very rapidly. Allen noted three essential conditions as the basis of the emergence of the collective-invention model. The first condition refers to the nature of the technology. In the period considered, there was no consolidated understanding of the working of a blast furnace. What the best engineers could do when designing a new blast furnace was to come up with some design guidelines on the basis of previous experiences. Obviously, the sharing of information related to the performance of a large number of furnaces allowed engineers to rely on a wider capita selecta of information in their extrapolations, leading to a more rapid rate of technological progress. Second, blast furnaces were designed by independent consulting engineers who were normally employed on a one-time basis. In this context, the most talented engineers had a strong incentive to disseminate the successful design novelties they had introduced in order to enhance their professional reputation and improve their career prospects. Third, iron producers were often also owners of iron mines. As a consequence, improvements in the efficiency of blast furnaces would have led to an enhancement in the value of the iron deposits of the region. Thus, there was an interest in the improvement of the average performance of blast furnaces, because only improvements in the average performance would made influence to increasing the value of iron deposits. More recent industry has seen similar activity of open development. In the early of 20 th century, Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association instituted a cross-licensing agreement among US automotive manufacturers, whereby all Embracing Open Source Software to Empower Potentials of the Community Husni Thamrin T 1