The Commercial Case for Open Source Software

This post is written in association with Pentaho, a commercial open-source (COSS) provider of reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and data integration software.

The history of open source has already been written and rewritten a couple of times, so there's no need to go back to Genesis chapter one and revisit Linus Torvalds' "just a hobby, won't be big" comments too often.

But open source became more than the sum of its parts and the hobbyists grew successful in domains that traditionally belonged to their proprietary relatives.

Historical Note: If you do still want the history of open source, then the YouTube hosted Revolution OS is about 100 minutes of the best open development commentary you will find.

Open source grew up, we know that part. With a rich pedigree of success in the server room, open platforms eventually moved upwards through the commercial sector and across to government in many developed nations.

What open source in these (and other mission-critical implementations) demands is not only the strong active developer community that typifies any open code base - it also very often needs a level of expert support and maintenance that works at a more formalized level than that which is available for free through the community. This especially applies to teams that are trying to solve hairy' problems for which skills are in short supply, like blending and analyzing diverse, big' data sets.

Support and maintenance are important, but there's another factor here.

Locked Down, Demarcated Openness More specifically (and more technically), open code is built with inherently dynamic libraries that are subject to change and community contribution at any time. However, commercial versions of open source software are always locked down and demarcated at the point of sale and therefore not subject to these dynamic changes.

This means that when organizations like NASA and the Met Office (arguably mission critical') use commercial open source software, they are able to define the exact static form and function of applications at the point of installation.

See the article here:
The Commercial Case for Open Source Software