5 Ways to Get Open Source Software Support

One great irony of proprietary software is that you pay to have less freedom and flexibility than you would get if you downloaded free open source software.

That's particularly true when you consider support. If you buy a commercial software package, you're usually able to get different levels of support from the software vendor. This may be included in the license fee, or you may have to pay extra for it.

In almost all circumstances, though, you're restricted to whatever the vendor offers. If you don't like what's offered, that's just too bad.

Free Software, Free Market Dynamic

The situation is quite different with open source software, as the source code is freely available for anyone to examine and modify. Support may not be available from a vendor in the way that it is with proprietary software - although vendors such as Red Hat do provide support as part of their subscription offering - but that certainly doesn't mean it isn't available at all.

Far from it. "The way to think about it is that support is unbundled (from the software) but widely available," says Simon Phipps, president of the Open Source Initiative and founder of open source management consultancy Meshed Insights.

If you're an Oracle customer, for example, you're effectively locked in to Oracle support. If you use Apache software, on the other hand, a number of support suppliers compete on quality and price.

[ Tips: How to Run Your Small Business With Free Open Source Software ][ Counterpoint: 7 Reasons Not to Use Open Source Software ]

It's hard, then, to avoid the fact that commercial software companies that restrict access to their source code have a monopoly on the provision of support. With open source software the polar opposite is true. "With open source, there's a free market dynamic to support," Phipps says, "and prices are controlled by the market."

This is a theme taken up by Simon Bowring, a director at open source support provider Transitiv Technologies. "We have customers who were previously using proprietary software and they were locked in. If they needed new features they had no option but to wait for the vendor to write them," he says. "With open source software, we can write code for our customers very quickly, and contribute it back to the community, if the customer agrees."

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5 Ways to Get Open Source Software Support