Jul
21
The Open Source Alternative
Posted by Harish TM | July 21, 2007 |
There are enough and more articles talking about why one should use Open Source software. However it is impossible to start talking about any Open Source product before getting this out of the way, so here we go.
The other day, one of my friends came up to me and said: “Why are you so pro Open Source, I don’t see how supporting Open Source is any different from supporting Microsoft”. At first I thought he was making a philosophical statement - but later I realized that he was not. He actually thought that “Open Source”, like Microsoft was a company. Its not.
So what then is Open Source? Wikipedia ( a free-content, collaborative encyclopedia ) defines it to be:
Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration.
Open Source comes with both philosophical and practical advantages. We will leave the philosophical advantages to another post and instead focus on the practical ones here. The primary advantages are:
- Less dependence on vendors [Example one, two and three]
- Lower costs
- Ease of customization [ Example one, two and three]
- Increased security
So now that we have established that Open Source is in fact an alternative worth exploring, lets move onto the what these alternatives are for individual applications. I intend to do this in a series of posts:
- Browsers - The Open Source Alternative
- Email Clients - The Open Source Alternative
- Office Automation - The Open Source Alternative
- Operating Systems - The Open Source Alternative
- Music and other media - The Open Source Alternative
- Image editing - The Open Source Alternative
Comments
1 Comment so far
[...] also has better security - Why is this not a surprise? Well Firefox is an Open Source project and so hundreds of people look through the code that actually runs Firefox and make sure that bugs [...]