LINUX MAGAZINESLINUX MAGAZINES: Open Source News, Articles and Reviews

Open source development is related developers collaboratively producing software for the free distribution, improvement, and use of anyone willing to abide by the software license-such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) or Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Commercial software, by contrast, is developed by programmers employed by one company (or in partnership with many companies) for the purpose of creating a package that will be sold and whose code is protected through various intellectual property mechanisms, such as a patent and/or a copyright, making that code inaccessible to the purchaser.

The open source model offers “better” software and encourages innovation. The developers contribute to open  projects to gain reputation among their peers. Some of them gain money through donations from users or through support/maintenance or training contracts. Solutions using this model have lower cost and are perfect for startups and home users.

Cost, security and flexibility are the most important advantages. Open source solutions, with their source code available for public scrutiny, is inherently more secure than commercial software solutions, whose source code is not published. Developers will find vulnerabilities in the code and fix them. Most of the open software has large active communities behind their development. They can be more secure than commercial software.

Those solutions are more flexible for customers compared to commercial software stems from the ability of a customer to examine the source code and make the necessary alterations to the code to effect changes in the behavior of the system desired by the customer. This also allows the technically-savvy customer to potentially identify any problems in the system and to make his own changes or fixes to the software to rectify the problem.

Bug fixes for those solutions come from a greater variety of sources. They may be developed through community effort and distributed through channels such as discussion groups. Such fixes may be iteratively refined and improved on by the community if the initial fixes do not correct the bug completely.

OpenOffice.org, Apache, and Linux are the most famous and most used  solutions. They are widely used and well known for their stability compared to Microsoft commercial products.

Lots of commercial firms market free solutions and make money on support. An example is Trixbox. It is an IP PBX with the community edition distributed for free while the professional edition comes with additional features and support is provided for a fee.

Wikipedia uses the mediawiki developed by the Wikimedia foundation. The foundation is running this huge encyclopedia relying on donations to survive with volunteer developers working for free.

Facebook is using also the same development model for its development. The PHP server side scripting is used and their site is hosted on Apache web server on a Linux server.

Conclusion

The open source and commercial software development and business models have complemented each other in a number of aspects. Nonetheless, the debate continues to rage on with regards to which model is “superior”.

Open source  is on a roll. A Saugatuck Research survey showed nearly 50% of businesses plan to use Linux for mission-critical systems by 2012, vs. just 18% in 2007.

Youssef Kassab is a computer expert specialized in Open source solutions. If you need any help don’t hesitate to visit my personal website and contact me http://www.youssefkassab.me/. You can also visit my personal blog on the following URL http://www.youssefkassab.info/ to read my articles about general issues.

Author: Youssef Kassab
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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