As outlined below, the choice of which software to use for a particular application really should be driven by your specific needs and circumstances. However, there are a number of broad benefits and challenges that are common across the whole realm of open source.
Understanding these principles will give you a general idea about whether or not open source is right for your organization.
Benefits of open source
There are many good reasons to consider open source software for your organization.
Some of these reasons include:
- Software and updates can be obtained at low or no cost. No royalties of license fees.
- Software can be customized to suit specific user needs.
- Upgrade development can be completed at a pace set by the users who pay for it.
- Much less likely to be dependent on a single software provider or trapped into long term software support contracts (no "lock in").
- Using open source makes you a part of a larger community that generally shares cooperative values.
- Software and documentation upgrade expenses can be distributed among groups.
- Creates an opportunity to hire small, local developers to improve the software rather than big foreign software publishers.
- Better security. Open source model allows more programmers to participate in the debugging of code. Specifically Linux and applications running on Linux have proven to be more reliable and secure than Windows equivalents. Also, less likely to have virus problems.
- Hardware flexibility. With some smart coding, Linux can be scaled to run on almost any kind of hardware. This is especially important for organizations who aim to use older computers.
- Bugs tend to get fixed more quickly.
- More likely to find and attract technical volunteers to work with open source applications.
- Usually use open standards that are gaining in adoption and most likely to be supported even more in the future (e.g. XML).
