Due to constantly changing business environments and globalization, technology implementation has allowed for international cooperation and business partnerships to grow and develop over the past few years. But to take full advantage of these new established business relationships, a close, efficient and transparent cooperation environment as well as a competitive advantage needs to needs to be established. For this to take place companies are looking to simplify their business processes and work more efficiently and faster than the competition.
Corporations are looking for tools that will not only manage global projects, fast communication but also documents and knowledge as well as provide them with the unique tools and feature that they need specifically for their type of business and their corporate structure and procedures. Of course, these are solutions are not off the shelf solutions and are not that simply developed for each unique feature and demand that the client has. Although it is possible, it has a price and the price can be very high, leaving companies looking for cheaper faster and more efficient solutions. These solutions can be in the form of groupware solution and even better, open source solutions.
What is Open-Source Software?
Open source software is computer software whose source code is available under a license that permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is often developed in a public, collaborative manner. Many Companies worldwide see a change in corporate attitudes toward open-source software. Once open source was seen as flaky, cheap and the work of amateur developers, now it has emerged from the dark and is more and more introduced in the commercial sector. With unrestricted access to the source code to run or modify based on needs, and support coming from an ad hoc collection of software developers and fellow users, the open-source model is very different from proprietary software.(Radvanovsky, 2004). But what are the advantages of using open source and why are more and more companies using it? Apparently the benefits of open source are worth the risk of implementation and making the switch from long used proprietary applications. One of the biggest discussions today is that if open source will dominate the filed of database management tools and solutions in a publicly and privately owned corporate environments as well as government entities. This paper will analyze on what to expect from open-source applications in the future, where the market will go and what aspects of open source need to be considered before the final decision has been made.
Why Use Open-Source Software?
There are many advantages of why companies tend to make the switch from proprietary software solutions to open source and one reasons that is among the most important, is the fact that open source allows for a much better flexibility when it comes to creating a product that fits there corporate needs and requirements. The fact that open source is based on a license where the source coed is open to public, can be changed, added, implemented and used as required offers a basis upon which corporations can select a product that is similar to their needs, and either hire developers to develop add-ons, or even download already created patches, add-ons or templates to create the application that is needed. Open source applications and their development is an ongoing worldwide effort by developers located in various locations and therefore collaboration and transparency is part of the open source movement, supporting unique inventions and providing vast resources developed by a constantly growing group of developers.
This environment allows tapping into the unlimited and worldwide knowledge of thousands of developers as well as the vast resources and tools that have been developed already without having to re-invent the wheel again and as a major plus, having it for a lot cheaper than trying to get a custom made software solutions from Microsoft or Oracle. Price certainly is one of the biggest advantaged that open source has. According to a survey by analyst firm Forrester Research, an average of 72% of European firms claim lower total cost of ownership and lower software acquisition costs as the key advantages over commercial software (Fanini, 2005). Although it might be considered that open source is a download, install and all is free, it certainly will require administration, updates and maybe customization, which will not be for free. While cost is a huge driver for decision-making process, corporations cannot risk choosing an inferior solution to save money. Considerations for open source would not happen if open source would not be at par with – or in some cases better than – commercial alternatives. The big attraction of open source is that there’s a zero marginal cost of scale because open source does not require additional licenses as an installation grows.
Open source applications offer a price advantage over many proprietary solutions, but it is not necessarily the price tag that corporations look at when making the choice if using open source is something that will benefit them. “It’s not about being cheap,” insists Employease’s Alberg. “It’s about doing our jobs effectively – and we’re willing to pay quite a bit for that. We want stable software that does what it says it will do.” Research has shown that open source allows for a much better computer performance and stability, which has improved drastically in the last five years. When comparing operating systems Linux, which is an open source application, against the proprietary Microsoft Server operating system, the Linux application will run much more stable, with much less downtime than Microsoft, which in most cases will crash several times a week (Wheatley, 2004).
These points are certainly major selling points that drive the success of open source solution into the commercial as well as government world, but there are negative sides that need to be considered before making a sound decision. Until recently, the use of open source software was limited by a number of factors, with accountability and reliability near the top of the list. Many potential users feared that interest in open source projects might diminish and leave them without support or maintenance for their software. And to some extend these fears were reasonable. On many open source websites and portals, many incomplete open source projects can be found that have simply been abandoned. But these times have changed. Because open source applications are free to download, support and maintenance of these has become a major revenue generator for many small and big companies around the world. Even large corporations such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, as well as open source specialists such as Novell and Red Hat have been attracted by this opportunity and made significant commitments to open source technologies. Projects such as the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, and the Perl programming language, have proven themselves as viable alternatives to equivalent commercial offerings all over the world and are frequently used in the commercial as well as government sector (Wrigh, 2006).
Critics of open source site the lack of support as one of the major concerns. If a corporation has a customized open source application place, who are they going to call when the system needs to be troubleshooted? The vendor cannot provide the support, as there is no vendor for the existing application. The support issue is very complex and can be very time consuming, as troubleshooting will be limited to getting the knowledge and answers to a technical problem from mailing lists, blogs, open source forums as well as from various internet archives. But in some cases this can even be an advantage. Multiple sources of support can be better than being tied to one vendor – especially when that vendor provides bad support or refuses to continue supporting software after releasing a new product, such as Microsoft or other large proprietary vendors have practiced it in the recent years. In reality, existing users of open-source software appear perfectly happy with open-source support arrangements. “The breadth of resources available for open-source applications is so great worldwide that we can get support, communicate with a developer or download a patch no matter the time of day” (Wheatley, 2004).
But even though the support factor might be in come cases a valid argument why not to implement open source, it is the overall picture that open source offers that is the main reason why open source will become a more and more important tool for the commercial sectors. The factor is the fact that corporations have the ability to develop and manage their own software strategy. In today’s constantly changing business needs and the battle for competitiveness, businesses need to be flexible and flexibility in their world is counted in time and finances. Many corporations cannot wait on a major vendor or supplier to provide them with the application solution then need to maintain or improve their business advantage. Businesses can no longer wait and need to act as fast as possible and that is something that open source allows for. Transparency is the hallmark of a successful open source project and it is not just the fact to have the source code, but also the visibility and the community of the people around it. It is the people who use it, have developed it, provided add-ons or customized solutions (Daly, 2006). Just alone the advantage of the very well maintained documentation of open source, differs sharply from other types of software development where documentation is often poor or an afterthought, especially when development is done in-house. The documentation requirement due to the fact that development is done all over the world is an essential and positive part of open source: discussions tend to take place over email – which can be archived into logs for future reference – and through web-based tracking and version control systems to help co-ordinate the project’s development. This allows for time efficiency when designing customized solutions to meet customers requirements.
The advantages of open source have been advocated widely over the past few years, but after analyzing the main factors, the prognosis of open source applications in the future is a constantly growing and developing market, which eventually might replace today’s dominant proprietary sector. IT decision makers who value reduced dependence on software vendors, programmers and suppliers as the most important advantage of open source will not only keep that in mind during their decision making process but also the fact that obtaining the original source code will make it easy to resolve many technical problems “in-house” (Radvanovsky, 2004).
Over time, if fully developed, the new open source models of software development could produce innovative, cost-efficient software at much less cost than today allowing for much more flexibility, especially for companies with an external focus, which are used to working collaboratively with other organizations. As the past decade has shown, standardization with a proprietary flavor such as Microsoft has its drawbacks: security loopholes, eye-popping license fees and an unsettling reliance upon a single vendor with technical support that will no longer be provided as soon as a new technology is on the market. In offices around the globe, an era of open-source standardization, determined to condemn proprietary drawbacks and taking advantage of the knowledge of developers around the world to develop customized software solution to keep up with the fast changing business needs, is beginning to dawn.
