Save money and fall in love with open source

It amazes me how many people and businesses are either unaware or actually fear open source or free software.

I don't understand why people still during this economic downturn keep giving their money to foreign companies. This money could either be saved by directly using open source or buying support & consulting services from local companies keeping the money in the country.

It seems to be a common misconception that the quality of open source software is lower than the quality of commercial software. It's true that the quality of open source varies a lot, but so does the quality of close sourced commercial software. It's all about marketing.

It's also widely believed that there is no support for open source software while commercial software is fully supported. This is not true, just try asking Microsoft to fix some highly critical bug in their software (like this one), and I'll bet that they will not even bother to answer.

Usually open source developers are very quick on fixing bugs in their own pet projects, but this is something that can naturally not be guaranteed. On the other hand since the user/company/government has access to the source code they can either fix the problem themselves or hire someone (trusted) to fix the problem for them. This might cost a significant amount of money depending on the problem, but at least the possibility exists.

The access to the source code also gives the user a chance for a code audit and to compile the the source code to binaries themselves, something which might be very difficult if not impossible with commercial closed source software. In some environments e.g. government or military, this might be the only way to be absolutely sure what binary code is running on the hardware. Because if you don't know what you are running something bad might happen.

One area that has historically been the Achilles' heel of open source is training courses and educational material of good quality. However, today there is an increasing amount of education material and courses arranged dealing with the usage of open source software. This is especially an area where public tax funded schools should help. They should not only teach the children to use commercial software but also present them with alternatives. A good start would include Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Gimp, but the journey should definitely at some point visit Ubuntu (Linux).

Finally perhaps the biggest advantage of open source is the absence of vendor lock-in. Open source software usually uses standard, documented, open, patent free file formats which means that the user will always have access to his files, the ones that he after all created and owns. This is not always the case with commercial software that often uses undocumented binary blobs of data (I'm looking at you with your memory dumps Word), that are unreadable by the user if the manufacturer decides to stop supporting its application, or go out of business.

I must add that even if the software is free and open source, the user might still not be allowed to do anything he likes with the software. The terms what may or may not be done depend on a number of things e.g. if the software is in commercial or noncommercial use. These terms are explained in the license accompanied with the software itself. The most common and known license is GPL, but a number of other licenses also exist.

In conclusion I would like to point out that the most important thing after all is to find software that suits the users need, let that be either open or closed sourced software.

All I ask is keep your mind open and don't be afraid to try something new and different. You might be pleasantly surprised :)

Written by yours truly, who makes his living writing (open source) software.