This is a post in a series on the importance of open source. If you are not familiar with term "Open Source", I recommend you read this blog post first.

While open source does not always mean free as in money, it does mean free as in freedom^[1][2]. When you buy a product you would expect the freedom to not only use it, but to be able to modify it to your needs. This is exactly what open source allows you to do. It gives you the permission and rights to modify and redistribute some of the best software and products in the world.

Traditionally software has been treated as intellectual property, restricting access to the source code and denying access to modify it. This can have a very negative impact on a company. For example, if a company just bought a new piece of software or an operating system, they would be very annoyed if they found it doesn't do one small piece of functionality that is critical to their business. If this software is proprietary the company could have to wait years for their feature to be implemented, assuming their request was approved.^[3]Not only would this company have to remodel their business structure to the software's methodology, but they would also be locked into the software vendor, relying on them for updates (which may not always be free).

Now if we take the same example but this time the company buys open source software, it is an entirely different story. Like before, the software doesn't provide the functionality or integration that the company requires. All may seem lost, but not quite! Because the software is under an open source license^[4], the company is now able to make the changes they want to this software either by themselves or by hiring a third party developer.

It may seem that the company would lose out by buying software and then paying a developer to extend it, but what it really allows the company to do is tailor software to their exact needs, thus saving time and resources not having to rearrange their business structure. Through open source, companies are able to get software to meet their business needs and models rather then orientating their organisation, structure and methodology to the vendor's way of thinking. In addition to this, open source software is generally a lot cheaper than proprietary software. (To learn more about how open source software can be so cheap, follow the links below.)

Now lets say that the company has been using this software for a few years and the vendor has decided to discontinue support for the product (this is quite a common occurrence, especially given the rate of change in technology). If the company had bought the product from a propitiatory vendor they would be in a lot of trouble. There would be no way of having any problems raised in the future amended and they would have to rely on the current training and knowledge they have. Imagine if the software stopped working after a while^[5], the company could lose all of their records and work.^[6] However, if the software is open source and the vendor discontinues commercial support, any other industry worker can help the company with no restrictions. This means a third party or developer can pick up support for the product themselves and even supply new versions and fixes. Thanks to open source the company can continue to operate on the software for as long as it needs.

• Learn more about how open source saves your company money
• Learn more about how open source software gets developed, and how open source software vendors make money, even when their product is free.

1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre

2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software

4.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license

5.

For example, the Y2K: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K

6.

Read the importance of open standards in Bob's series here: