So, what is the big deal with open source software? Besides the fact that it’s free, and it gives you all of the freedoms without all of the licensing restrictions. The business agility open source offers is quickly eroding the main stream. In a 2013 survey with over 800 participants from both vendor and non-vendor communities it was reported that open source software has matured to such an extent that it now influences everything from innovation to collaboration among competitors to hiring practices.
According to Forrester analyst, Jeffrey Hammond, 76% of developers have used some form of open-source technology. Today the ‘open source way’ is more than an operating system platform. Open source is describing the free exchange of ideas in any atmosphere. It brings people together to share creative ideas and collaborate, experiment with your practical ideas, and create a global community for everyone to work together. Mozilla Firefox, Linux, and Google’s Android are all examples of open source software. Anyone online is readily able to download and use the open source code to do pretty much whatever they want with it whether it’s changing it, distributing it, etc. So why are not only companies but also private users trending toward open source?
Quality
In the aforementioned survey participants were also asked why they made the switch to open source. The most common response, above price and freedom, was quality. Quality, being the biggest factor in open source adoption, is clearly a good enough reason to shift over. Users of open source argue that when a bug in the system or a problem arises, users are able to confront the program and combat the issue as a community. Putting all of the brain power together to solve the issue is a lot more efficient than one lone programmer trying to come up with a solution on his own.
Stratoscale is one of the growing names trending amongst open source communities. They are integratable with open source products within their own service – and are contributors to the leading open source coding initiatives such as Openstack and KVM. Their hyper convergence infrastructure is built upon a private initiative to incorporate both major open source and proprietary software applications to run your own application, with no restrictions and with a high level of efficiency.
FREE!
People love things that are free. In this sense of the word, open source is not only free as in it costs nothing to the user, but it’s also free as in it gives you freedom. Freedom to do what you want with the platform and freedom to say what you want without worrying about your intellectual property or anything else you say being recorded or tracked. The cost advantage however is very significant. How else could a company like Netflix for example manage to charge just 8$ per month for their service? The answer is they built everything using open source software.
Culled from the Entrepreneur in Forbes
