The free/open source approach has grown from a minor activity to become a significant producer of robust, task-orientated software for a wide variety situations and applications. Examples range from core infrastructure platforms such as the apache web-server, powerful document indexing and search tools such as Lucene through to major user-orientated systems such as Mediawiki (which powers Wikipedia) and Drupal (which powers many diverse websites). To life science informatics groups, these systems present an appealing proposition - high quality software at a very attractive price. Open source software in life science research considers how industry and applied research groups have embraced these resources, discussing practical implementations that address real-world business problems.