Open source software: Advantages & disadvantages

Open source software in simple terms is free software that you can use in your business. Open source developers choose to make the source code of their software publicly available for the good of the community and to publish their software with an open source license meaning that other developers can see how it works and add to it.

Examples of open source products such as WordPress (a content management system), Open Office, the internet browser Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, the GNU/Linux operating system and its derivative Android, an operating system for mobile devices.

From a business user perspective, open source software works in much the same way as proprietary software systems provided by commercial software firms the only difference being that generally you dont pay for it. However there are a few important differences the idea behind open source software is that users are effectively co-developers, suggesting ways to improve it and helping to hunt out bugs and problems.

This means that if you wish, you can modify it to your own needs, port it to new operating systems and share it with others.

You can download open source software onto your computer system in the same way you would proprietary software. Some software providers such as Alfresco, MySQL and Ingres offer both open source versions of their software and paid-for proprietary versions.

Because of the way it has been developed, open source software can require more technical know-how than commercial proprietary systems, so you may need to put time and effort into training employees to the level required to use it.

Start with the most popular open source software systems that have built up a large community of support behind them, so you have somewhere to go to if you need advice.

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Open source software: Advantages & disadvantages