Question

Why would an organization run its business using software that is free? Can something that is given away over the Internet be stable or reliable or sufficiently supported to place at the core of a company’s day-to-day operations?

Answer 1

With the many business and government organizations that now use open source software such as Linux, it's becoming increasingly clear that price is not the only advantage such software holds. If it were, companies that adopted it during the Great Recession would surely have switched back to the expensive proprietary stuff as soon as conditions began to ease, and that's clearly not the case.

ADVANTAGES

Open-source software is free to use, distribute, and modify. It has lower costs, and in most cases this is only a fraction of the cost of their proprietary counterparts.

Open-source software is more secured as the code is accessible to everyone. Anyone can fix bugs as they are found, and users do not have to wait for the next release. The fact that is continuously analyzed by a large community produces secure and stable code.

Open source is not dependent on the company or author that originally created it. Even if the company fails, the code continues to exist and be developed by its users. Also, it uses open standards accessible to everyone; thus, it does not have the problem of incompatible formats that exist in proprietary software.

• SECURITY
• QUALITY
• FLEXIBILITY
• CUSTOMIZABILITY
• FREEDOM
• INTEROPABILITY
• COST
• TRY BEFORE YOU BUY

DISADVANTAGES

• The main disadvantage of open-source software is not being straightforward to use.
• Open-source operating systems like Linux cannot be learned in a day. They require effort and possibly training from your side before you are able to master them. You may need to hire a trained person to make things easier, but this will incur additional costs.
• There is a shortage of applications that run both on open source and proprietary software; therefore, switching to an open-source platform involves a compatibility analysis of all the other software used that run on proprietary platforms.
• In addition, there are many ongoing parallel developments on open source software. This creates confusion on what functionalities are present in which versions.
• Lastly, many of the latest hardware are incompatible to the open-source platform; so you have to rely on third-party drivers.