Proprietary software is often more expensive than the open source alternative
January 28, 2009 – 9:31 amThis week I was asked why felt that it was expensive to use proprietary software. While the following line of thought will not be new to anybody who is involved in the open source community I felt that perhaps it might be useful for others to read.
I think ‘cost’ for a student is measured in £££, which is important, but, as a business owner and a developer I think that time often is more important than £££.
Open source software is a low cost alternative to proprietary software. For example, the Linux operating system is a low cost alternative to the Microsoft Server 2003 operating system. This popularity is very evident when you see that today the largest market share for web servers is held by the open source Apache system (51% market share). Many think that the key advantage of open source software is its low cost of ownership. I believe that this is not the case.
As a business owner I see other advantages, namely:
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Reduced dependence on software vendors
- Easier to customize
- Higher level of security
By far, the most important thing that open source software gives me is independence. I really value my vendor independence. This includes independence from the vendor for maintenance, support and the
necessity accept version upgrades that I do not want or need.
For example, when Microsoft releases a new operating system it usually phases out support for older versions. This would force me to upgrade the OS on our network, even if we felt that we didn’t need the update. In contrast, there is no forced upgrade cycle with open source. Older versions of open source products continue to be supported through the open source community and third party support providers as long as there is demand in the marketplace for such support.
I am not a Microsoft basher, we do use Microsoft products on our network. We use WinXP on all internal desktops with Office and Micorsoft Exchange on our internal network. But it would be very unlikely that I would use it on may of our scan network.
