The Open Source Model
The Open Source Model has a lot to offer the business world. It's a way to build open standards as actual software, rather than paper documents. It's a way that many companies and individuals can collaborate on a product that none of them could achieve alone. It's the rapid bug-fixes and the changes that the user asks for, done to the user's own schedule.
Benefits
- Openness - the advantage of Open Source as having the code makes it easy to resolve problems.
- Stability - Open Source software is more stable then most commercially distributed software.
- Security - new Open Source projects tend to be insecure. When a project matures and is production-ready, it will become more reliable and secure than most available commercial software.
- Adaptability - Open Source software means Open Standards. It is easy to adapt software to work closely with other Open Source software and even closed protocols and proprietary applications solving vendor lock-in situations.
- Innovation - Open Source keeps competition alive as there are no unfair advantages.
- Quality - not only does software evolve onto a stable product, but a large user base also supplies new possibilities, making Open Source a feature-rich solution. It also includes more new features, less bugs and a broader (testing) audience (peer-review) is significant to the quality of a product.
- Cost effective - as most Open Source software is freely available and doesn't cost any additional licenses per user, this allows us to cut down in price and spend more time developing more secure and adapted solutions.
Increased reliability is the fundamental benefit of the Open Source Model. Think about how closed sources made the Y2K problem worse and how might have destroyed your business. Open Source software will benefit worldwide users without exceptions or constraints.