Why Open Source?

• It's more secure.

Instead of having a review of employees in a company trying to meet deadlines, deal with office politics and advance in their jobs, OS projects are scrutinized by users from all over the globe, with many and varied purposes. There are no preset outcomes. The agenda for those doing the development is to make the best, most stable, most secure platform they can. Individual software developers on OS projects know that their work is available to anyone, and so the entire project is pushed to a higher standard of excellence. Quick fixes and workarounds are quickly identifed and remedied. Holes and bugs that could be exploited by malicious hackers are fixed within hours of discovery, not days or weeks.


• It has better support.

Since the successful open source projects have thousands to hundreds of thousands of users, there are a multitude of web sites, news groups and dicussion forums available for free. Chances are that any problems you find have already been fixed!

Additionally, there are many companies that specialize in supporting Open Source software systems for a reasonable fee. This allows a pay as you go structure for critical issues that may come up.


• It has a better ROI (Return on Investment)

With normal commercial solutions, you pay for the licenses to the software and then start paying for installation, configuration and support. When it's time to upgrade, you pay license fees again, then pay for the labor to upgrade the software. With open source solutions, there are typically no license fees. You still pay for install and support, even if you do it yourself. Time is money.

A key point to understand about OS solutions, unlike commercial solutions, is that you are not leasing them from a Vendor. You can do whatever you like with software; in many cases you are even allowed to use it as the basis for a commercial offering of your own.

The bottom line is that it's YOUR software, not a Vendor's. Additionally, upgrades tend to be much less painful than with commercial offerings. More time is allowed to be spent on design issues, thus minimizing incompatibilities.

You can influence the future direction of the software package, getting features that you need! Try doing that with a Microsoft or Adobe.

• Learn more about Open Source.

• Back to Software Development.