Open Source Software Advantages

Besides the low license cost, open source software often have other advantages that are more important:

The right to modify the software: reach a detailed understanding of how the system works, unlimited tuning and improvement, easier to isolate bugs, extend the lifetime of an application

redistrubite modifications and improvements, shared by large communities, attract new developers. large market for support and customisation, improved quality and functionality.

there is no one with the power to restrict the software development in an unilateral way, there is no single entity on which the future of the software depends

dependable applications, no "black boxes", critical code/applications can be inspected in detail by a large community

Usually open source software is delivered ``when it is ready'', and when the development team feels that its quality is good enough. This means that software usually does not need as many ``service packs'', updates and such, reducing the maintenance cost.

read the source code to learn how constructs and functions can be used. Learn what choices others have made by reading their code, preferably by reading code written by better programmers than ourselves.

And finally, share your own code! I myself for example have a project at sourceforge: Quotesviewer to track quotes on the Euronext Stock Exchange.

If you want to use Open Source Software to run your business on take care to evalute the OSS, it is not always the best solutions and not all OSS applications are worth the effort. Business Readiness Rating provides you a method to evaluate OSS.

Open Source for Business is another weblog i maintain with news on open source successes in business use.