Open Source as an alternative to Corporates
March 19, 2009 Alternatives, Corporations, Open Source
Open Source as a implementation is as old as the Internet dating from APRANET. The RFC (Request for Comments) of ARPANET is the first Open Source distribution of specifications that were proprietary. However, Open Source as a term was credited to Netscape the company that once owned world’s most popular browser beside Internet Explorer. Failing the great Browser War to Microsoft in a law suit that costed its existence, Netscape created the first real Open Source initiative, the Mozilla as we know today. Ever since, organizations and public alike from all over the world were always on the lookout for Open Source alternatives whenever their proprietary solutions hit their nerves.
As an Individual who has spent very good time on some of the best Open Source products, I always believed that having an alternative to the proprietary solutions that tend to be just the money machines is always refreshing. Many people think that Open Source means free software (in terms of cost). Open Source doesn’t meant to be free of cost. This is highly important because, many organizations, when offered a choice of Open Source, immediately backed up saying there’s as quality as the money goes (which means, the higher the price, the perfect the software – again a phenomenon). Individuals also believed that you can’t expect quality from a person who’s doing coding for free. That’s is true if we don’t consider the passion that some people really show in the work they do no matter whether it’s for a cost or not. There are also some Open Source softwares which are not free of cost. Again, as I stated, a software’s quality can’t be decided by its price or proprietary.
The significant difference as I see it, whether it’s a paid software or free-of-cost software lies in whether the software is open to modifications or not. Many organizations argue that having an Open Source software doesn’t means anything since they couldn’t modify it because of the unavailability of the resources or the time to do so. That’s acceptable, but that can’t be a reason to ignore a software that gives the possibility of modification against a software that gives a possibility of just patches that may come in a year. I would say the main reason why Open Source got so famous is because of the company Microsoft. They realized it very late. But its simply the single most reason why so many people got frustrated with Proprietary Softwares. The kind of frustrations that started with the Windows Operating System to all of Microsoft products that showed systemic errors which gave nothing as a reason to understand, support that always considers the Customer is the problem, updates that always breaks more things than the ones its supposed to fix. There are so many instances that can be told about this. But again, Microsoft is an example only (highly significant example). There are so many popular Proprietary software companies like Adobe, Corel etc that produces softwares which are used by millions of users worldwide yet giving them frustrations at some point of time. Any software that is written by human being can always contain bugs, that is an understandable universal fact. However, that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t be fixing it. That’s where Open Source gets handy providing a way to fix things by ourselves if we have the time and resources to do so. Or, at least allows us to look into the right place for answers when something goes wrong instead of closing itself sealed and ask us to contact the Administrator who was never there.
Another argument of corporates against Open Source is the availability of Customer Support. I actually get surprised when organizations through such a lame argument. Because, its prudently evident that you can get as much support as given by any Proprietary Software in any of the Open Source softwares if only you looked in the right place. Many Open Source products that are free-of-cost has a Support availability through community which is also free-of-cost or a paid contract for support just like the proprietary ones. Here, yet another advantage of Open Source softwares over proprietary softwares is that in most cases, for the proprietary softwares you’ll be ended up paying the license cost and support cost wherein Open source you’ll be paying for only the support. In the case of Proprietary software, community support is always very less because the community is again another set of frustrated users who either got lucky to find an way to fix the problem or paid the cost to know the solution. But, in Open Source, the community is the strongest support you can ever get as it consists of users who are passionate about figuring out the problem by themselves, hacking through the code and fix it by themselves instead of looking for outside support and people who actually wrote the original code of that software. In my experience, I’ve always seen that the best learning one can get is from the one they learned by hard ways.
Life-time of the Open Source softwares is another concern of Corporates. In this case, we have to be the judge of ourselves or get good judgement from the community. It is sadly true that most Open Source softwares tend to expire after some time. However, this is not the case with most popular open source products that learned a way to earn (through paid support or advertisements) and keep the community going. So, it will be a tough decision for the corporate to decide which parts of their IT infrastructure can be replaced by Open Source implementations that don’t just expire. There is also a high advantage if the corporate is willing to understand the code. If it spent enough time and resources to understand the code and structure of the open source implementation, they can always keep the software up to date despite of whether it got expired in the community or not. It also serves another purpose as if at any point of time they encounter a problem, they can simply fix it themselves.
Implementation and migration cost over proprietary implementations already in place is another huge concern of Corporates. I’ve to agree with this completely as it’s a very tough decision for Corporates who invested a lot in proprietary implementations that were running for quite some time. However, I would never suggest open source as a complete and overall drop in replacement. Implementation can be step by step and highly planned to avoid this. Also, once implemented, on the long run, it reduces much of the cost which is the running cost of proprietary implementations. Over a period of time, if we analyze, we may found that even the implementation cost is fully recovered by the reduced running costs.
Virus, Malwares and Trojans disguised as Open Source softwares is also a concern of individuals and corporates alike who are considering open source alternatives. I can’t guarantee here that every open source is secured. However, I can guarantee that most of the popular open source distributions tend to be more secure than the proprietary distributions. One should also consider the kind of place from where the software is being downloaded and run some anti virus tests before starting implementation. Downloading from official servers of the organization that developed the open source tends to be always more secure. Also, I’ve seen that open source implementations were quick to release updates if any vulnerabilities found in their software. Again, as I told previously, the corporates themselves can look into the code and decide if there were any malware code existing in the open source implementation. Particularly because of the Open Source nature, these kinds of malware codes tend to be less targeting the Open Source products against the highly targeted proprietary products. That is again another advantage of open sources considering in the case of proprietary softwares, you can’t find a way to cure the vulnerability until the developer themselves provides a patch.
Conclusively, in reality, there are more reasons to adopt Open Source than there are for adopting Proprietary Source if we know what we want and what we can do with what we require.
Please let me your comments…
