Corporate Blog

Strategy With Technology

  • Open Source Software - Changing the World for Better!

In the earlier days when website software technology was still in the nascent stage and proprietary software expensive the coming of open source software was a welcome change. People formed open -source communities and created software eco-system where innovation, creativity and usefulness to society was more valued than having any commercial aspect to the software product.  It was of great help to budding developers and technology-enthusiast, who wanted to do something new in software field but could not afford the resources or proprietary software. Even start-ups companies embraced this initiative, as it helped them to go online and make commercial software. This greatly reduced their software expense and thereby reducing the overall cost of the product.

 

In the beginning the open source software was limited in its usage and mainly served the purpose for promising developers and growing start-ups but as the time went by more and more patrons joined the race. Large corporate organizations were still skeptical about the use of open source technology as their primary source of software platform and relied more on proprietary technology. The reason most of them cited were lack of scalability, security and in some cases reliability. Some software giant’s even questioned the veracity of the open-source platform. Biggies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple never acknowledge the open source as the primary player in the software field. But with the open source success stories now even the large organization is also seeing the tons of benefits it is offering. Though open-source software is not going to wipe out completely the proprietary software ecosystems but it has certainly made software giants to take notice of them before pricing their products.

 

Today it is easy for start-ups to go online by making their websites or e-commerce stores quickly and affordably. Below are the lists of top open-source technologies:

 

1) Linux: It is undoubtedly considered one of the best operating system that is available on Earth. High on reliability, security and performance many large organizations still swear by Linux to run their critical applications.
 
2) RedHat: It is one of the most famous and largest Linux distribution vendors with revenue close to a billion dollar. Now that’s a tough competition for software biggies.
 
3) WordPress: This open source CMS has driven roughly 22% of active blogs in the US. The statistics numbers are even more encouraging in the rest of the world. The recent acquisition of mashable by CNN is built on WordPress.
 
4) MySql: It is widely used database management system and is highly popular for its open source nature. World’s top most website like Google, Wikipedia and Facebook uses it.
 
5) Openoffice: This product of Sun Microsystems now Oracle Corporation is an open-source office productivity suite with  word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics etc.
 
We can add more to the list, people and companies using open-source technology is growing by leaps and bounds. The truth is open source is here to stay, there is vast opportunity for both open-source and proprietary software to co-exist and lay the foundation for the next generation software.