Open your mind, use Open Source

Nowadays, choosing the technology and software that you want to use in your business is really a huge and risky decission, specially if you are involved with a Small or Medium Size Company. After the discussion on class about the Open Source tools, and also after making a small research between mates and friends about Open Source software I can say that people has no idea about which is really Open Source.

And now I can imaging the face of a SME's CEO when an IT Consultor suggests to change all their owner system, that sounds safe and easy to use because all the competence has the same (ie Microsoft software), and start using something called Linux or some Subversion system or using Apache...

Let's think for a while what's Open Source : "Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in." (Source www.opensource.org). But how this affects our bussines?

• Economic Advantages: Obviously this is one of the most important advantages, when we are hiring a developper to create any kind of software, we are the owners of the source code. That's a great advantage for us, due to we can reuse and adapt our own code without taking care of paying licenses or updates.
• Estability and Maintenance: the technology we use controls mostly all areas of business, so the needs of updating the software do not change as fast as the technological market grows and change. Using an owner software, we are oblied to follow the trends of the market and change our software and hardware according to the owners changes (updates of software sometimes are not needed at all and usually force us to change also the hardware). A well done software project can be extended, updated or changed maintaining a technological stability.
• Customization: It is imposible to find an owner software product that covers exactly all our needs. Using open source we can customize our tools according to the real needs of our business. This is also a great advantage regarding the security, because our software is unique, so it is more dificult for a hacker to find or to know the weakness or the backdoors of our system.

Due to all these reasons, we can be more competitive with a small invesment on technology. Giant companies are saving lots of money yearly using Open Source, i.e. Amazon saved $17 million in 2000 implementing their services with Linux. Yahoo, Google or AOL are implemented using Open Source as well. The European Union or the World Bank adopted Open Source in order to improve the security of their systems, and Sun Microsystems Iberica is working to be 100% Open Source... What else do we need to prove that is the best invesment for a small company??