The "Open source" term arose at the desire of some people that wanted to make available the source code of software that can be afterwards modified, improved and redistributed. In this way, a group formed by people from different places on Earth can work at the same project, in the same time, having at the end a better version of it. Open source software is licensed software offering the possibility to work without any problem, to collaborate in an open manner at a certain idea. Types of open software and hardware will be presented in this paper, precisely the ones that can be used for image processing. Except LINUX operating system, OpenCV is a type of open-source software, a computer vision library, available to everyone that wants to use it or has a better idea concerning a tool of that software, which can be used on other open source software, like ROS environment. In the last part of the paper, a study case using open source software will be presented.