How much does your company spend in technology? How much of that goes to paying for licenses and software?
During the recession, the Open Source industry is experiencing a strong growth that should continue for years to come. Budget cuts and an increase in viable options in the Information Technology (IT) field have lead many companies to rethink its IT expenditures. In the past, companies have paid hefty licensing fees and maintenance contracts. Because of today's economic climate, more companies and governments are shifting to using open source technologies for everything from its every day operations, to their e-commerce infrastructure to their databases.
What is Open Source?
Open Source Software refers to any software which may be copied and used freely. Unlike proprietary software, open source software can be copied, used, studied, modified and distributed with few or no copyright restrictions. Organizations using Open Source software only pay for the support needed and for adapting the programs to the specific needs of the organization. The promise of Open Source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, no vendor lock-in and business ownership.
Open Source versus commercial software
The main difference between commercial software and Open Source software is the structure within which it is created and distributed. While commercial software is constructed within corporate structures with profit in mind, Open Source software is created by high quality developers who believe in transparency and in peer to peer review and distributed freely.
Is Open Source compatible to commercial products?
Yes. Due to the prevalence of commercial software, the survival of Open Source depends on it being compatible with its paid counterparts. Therefore, for example, documents created using Open Office (the Open Source equivalent of Microsoft Office) can be saved as Microsoft office document and Microsoft Word documents can be opened in its Open Source counterpart. For example, this document was created using Open Office, with a laptop that runs on Windows, while a lot of the information was gathered using the Internet browser Mozilla (Open Source's equivalent of Internet Explorer).