Top 7 Reasons Why your Business Needs Open-Source

Contention between Open-Source groups freely releasing code and commercial vendors capitalizing on proprietary products started the minute software became a profit-generating industry. Unlike proprietary software, which oftentimes is difficult to customize and integrate with other software applications, open source software is made available publicly for free so that others can view, copy, learn, and share the code.

Here are seven areas where a comprehensive strategy that incorporates Open-Source software (OSS) can help your business:

1. Cost savings: There are no license fees, version upgrade fees, or hardware costs associated with OSS and often times there are few restrictions placed on how the software must be used. This makes it especially attractive to companies with budget constraints. 
2. Support: The implementation of an OSS application can offer a level of control that creates stability to the internal processes and methodologies that help in defining, constructing, designing, and validating the application, which is impossible with closed software solutions.
3. Security: Open-source is written by dozens of developers and reviewed by hundreds more. Thus, security problems are often spotted and fixed quickly. 
4. Flexibility: Open-Source products offer more flexibility, not only with their adherence to standards, but also by helping to alleviate against treacherous lock-in if they are chosen as core infrastructure components.
5. Auditable: Unlike closed-source software, which forces users to trust the vendor when security and standards claims are made, OSS. If the source code is not available those claims remain simply claims.
6. Reliability: It is developed in such a way that it is typically more reliable (i.e. fewer bugs) than software which is developed using a standard commercial development method.
7. Longevity: When a commercial software company goes out of business you lose all your support, bug fixes, security patches, and the possibility of future versions. 

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