Why Open Source is better for Business

When individual developers think of open source, they think "free." And with good cause: Who in their right mind wouldn't be interested in technology that they can get at no cost and use with few licensing restrictions?

When companies think of open source, these days they think "business agility," a quality they increasingly value above all others in the fast-changing marketplace.

When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” The ability to create new applications quickly, reliably and economically is drawing businesses big and small to open source and emboldening them to use it for ever-larger projects, IT practitioners say.

Here are key reasons why organizations of all sizes are taking open source seriously.

Security

It's hard to think of a better testament to the superior security of open source software than the recent discovery by Coverity of a number of defects in the Android kernel. What's so encouraging about this discovery, as I noted the other day, is that the only reason it was possible is that the kernel code is open to public view.

Android may not be fully open source, but the example is still a perfect illustration of what's known as "Linus' Law," named for Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. According to that maxim, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." What that means is that the more people who can see and test a set of code, the more likely any flaws will be caught and fixed quickly. It's essentially the polar opposite of the "security through obscurity" argument used so often to justify the use of expensive proprietary products, in other words.

Does the absence of such flaw reports about the code of the iPhone or Windows mean that such products are more secure? Far from it--quite the opposite, you might even say.

Keeps Costs down

Cost savings may be only part of open source's allure, but it's still a big part, no matter what size the organization. "How can Netflix charge as little as $8 per month for its service?" Hammond asks. "Because everything is built on open-source software. They focused on content, not building an operating system or a testing framework."

"It's like using Spring, JBoss or Drupal for content management," Hammond says. "Companies get the 'Lego blocks' for free, so they can spend their time and resources building what they want in particular." Enterprises have always customized packaged software such as ERP applications, except now, with open source, that customization is less expensive.

Customizability

Along similar lines, business users can take a piece of open source software and tweak it to suit their needs. Since the code is open, it's simply a matter of modifying it to add the functionality they want. Don't try that with proprietary software!

Quality

Which is more likely to be better: a software package created by a handful of developers, or a software package created by thousands of developers? Just as there are countless developers and users working to improve the security of open source software, so are there just as many innovating new features and enhancements to those products.In general, open source software gets closest to what users want because those users can have a hand in making it so. It's not a matter of the vendor giving users what it thinks they want--users and developers make what they want, and they make it well. At least one recent study has shown, in fact, that technical superiority is typically the primary reason enterprises choose open source software.

Freedom

When businesses turn to open source software, they free themselves from the severe vendor lock-in that can afflict users of proprietary packages. Customers of such vendors are at the mercy of the vendor's vision, requirements, dictates, prices, priorities and timetable, and that limits what they can do with the products they're paying for.

With FOSS, on the other hand, users are in control to make their own decisions and to do what they want with the software. They also have a worldwide community of developers and users at their disposal for help with that.

Delivers business agility

Not to be confused with agile development, business agility is the ability to react to marketplace demands quickly. Open source provides this to developers and businesses alike by speeding up the pace of software development.

Ron Pitt, the developer who worked with Development Is Child's Play's Wiss, is a partner with software consultancy LevelHead Solutions in Poway, Calif. If he needs new code for a project, he downloads it in minutes rather than developing it himself. "Sure, some of it's buggy, but I'd rather spend 15 minutes debugging it than writing it from scratch in 15 hours," Pitt says.

Reliability

Reliability is a loose term. Broadly, we can take it to mean the absence of defects which cause incorrect operation, data loss or sudden failures, perhaps what many people would mean when they use the term `bug'. Strictly, a bug would also mean failure to meet the specification, but since most Open Source projects dispense with the concept of anything easily recognisable as a formal specification, it's hard to point to that as good way of defining what is a bug and what is a feature. Determining what constitutes a bug is usually by agreement amongst the developers and users of the software (an overlapping community in many cases). Obvious failure to perform is easily recognised as a bug, as is failure to conform to appropriate published standards. Security related failings (exploits or vulnerabilities) are clearly bugs too. Each of these kinds of bugs is usually addressed with speedy fixes wherever possible and Open Source advocates will claim very rapid time-to-fix characteristics for software.

Support Options

Open source software is generally free, and so is a world of support through the vibrant communities surrounding each piece of software. Most every Linux distribution, for instance, has an online community with excellent documentation, forums, mailing lists, forges, wikis, newsgroups and even live support chat.

For businesses that want extra assurance, there are now paid support options on most open source packages at prices that still fall far below what most proprietary vendors will charge. Providers of commercial support for open source software tend to be more responsive, too, since support is where their revenue is focused.