About MOSS

Maldives Open Source Society (MOSS) is a not for profit organization registered in the Republic of Maldives to support, advocate, oversee and promote the use, implementation and development of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) within the country. The name MOSS was finalized on December 27th, 2008 after a long debate on MLUG Mailing List.

MOSS is an initiative of the Maldives Linux User Group (MLUG) and had it's early history and projects run under MLUG's resources, although ironically, MLUG is now a member of MOSS and oversees it's operations and developments.

Mission

MOSS is an initiative to provide a collaborative platform and forum to promote and facilitate Linux and FOSS. It's members are from the community, civil society, students abroad, professional bodies and businesses who promote the FOSS concepts. It is aimed to help policy makers, commercial enterprises, and users to take advantage of the benefits of FOSS. It also facilitates and administers FOSS based projects like localization and translation of various FOSS to Dhivehi.

MOSS thrives to promote the use of FOSS everywhere. By everywhere we mean at Homes, Offices and Businesses. We believe that the use of FOSS will bring great benefits such as:

  • Elevate education and the overall experience by use of open educational systems.
  • Increased sharing and collaboration within the community.
  • Reduce overall software costs related to purchase and licensing.
  • Reduced support costs.
  • Empower developers and increase technical expertise.
  • Reduce the boundaries that lie between software vendors and users.

What is Free Software?

Free software is software that respects your freedom. It gives you the freedom to use, modify, share or even sell the software. To use FOSS is to make a moral and ethical choice asserting your rights to learn and to share what you learn with others.

What is Open Source Software?

From opensource.org, "Open Source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

For more detailed information, read the Open Source definition.