Educational institutions have rushed to put their academic resources and services online, beginning the global community onto a common platform and awakening the interest of investors. Despite continuing technical challenges, online education shows great promise. Open source software offers one approach to addressing the technical problems in providing optimal delivery of online learning. "Open source" refers to both the concept and practice of making program source code openly available. Users and developers have access to the core designing functionalities that enable them to modify or add features to the source code and redistribute it. Extensive collaboration and circulation are central to the open source movement. Open source products have gained considerable currency in the realm of higher education. In this article, the authors discuss the open source software, its history and its impact on learning. (Contains 1 table and 27 endnotes.)