In the last few years, whenever anyone has talked about trends in web development, the words “Open Source” have come up. And whenever you ask whoever brought the words up just what they mean by that term, you’re likely to get the answer “Free software. Or, the source code is available for free.” And in the past, many businesses have shied away from Open Source software and methodologies, precisely because of this: it has an unpleasant association. “Well, you get what you pay for,” many companies would muse. “If it’s so great, why are they making it available on the Internet for free?”
Concurrent to this, however, Open Source technologies have exploded in popularity, and the Web itself has grown to depend on it for its very existence. “…many (businesses) had a belief that open-source software is necessarily not professional,’ that it is shoddily made and more prone to fail than closed software….” the Open Source Initiative’s website states. “But the Internet’s infrastructure makes the best possible refutation…Consider DNS, sendmail, the various open-source TCP/IP stacks and utility suites, and the open-source scripting languages such as Perl that are behind most ‘live’ content on the Web. These are the running gears of the Internet(http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php).”
Because of this explosion in popularity, more and more businesses have begun looking closely at Open Source solutions. In the Open Source community, the source code for a product is not closed and protected as it is in proprietary systems, and this, in the end, makes for higher quality software. The code is scrutinized and modified by developers from outside the originating development team; additions are made, snarly bits of code re-worked, and the whole package tends to improve with age because of the participation of an informed and largely self-motivated group of programmers. “Computers and automation have become so ingrained and essential to day-to-day business that a sensible business should not rely on a single vendor to provide essential services.
Having a choice of service means not just having the freedom to choose; a choice must also be affordable.” maintains Brian Behlendorf in the book Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (O’Reilly, 1999). “The switching cost is an important aspect to this freedom to choose. Switching costs can be minimized if switching software does not necessitate switching platforms. Thus it is always in a customers’ interests to demand that the software they deploy be based on non-proprietary platforms(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/brian.html).”
The Open Source Initiative calls this development cycle a “bazaar-style” cycle, and makes no bones about it’s success in delivering high quality software:”It’s worth pointing out that the open-source, bazaar method resembles the way many successful Japanese companies have done consumer product development; get a product to market that works but is not perfect, and iterate quickly based upon customer feedback to reach the combination of features that he customers need and want(http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php).”
A familiar case of this would be the difference between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and the new Mozilla Firefox browser: Internet Explorer is widely known to be full of security holes, and spyware and adware writers exploit these holes ravenously. Firefox, on the other hand, is an Open Source project; not only is Mozilla’s team of developers working on making it a safer, more reliable browser, but the entire open source community works on it as well. In the end, Firefox is an infinitely more secure choice than Internet Explorer because of this.
The bazaar cycle of development has advantages that clearly leave proprietary methodologies in the dust. GBDirect, a development and consultancy firm based in the UK, eloquently illustrates the difference between closed, proprietary development and the open source model: “Authors are motivated by pride and peer recognition rather than a development plan supplied by the marketing department. Most want to see the software themselves and they prefer robustnesss before adding features. Authors are likely to consider it a ‘win’ if they can reduce the complexity and improve the maintainability of software. This rarely comes high on the product plan for commercial software. Where several authors work in parallel, the best-of-crop solution can be chosen in place of the only solution (as would be typical for a commercial product). Where source code is freely published and widely distributed, the users of the product will often discover and correct defects themselves. If no commercial entity benefits from that work, the motivation to do so for the common good is much higher(http://open-source.gbdirect.co.uk/migration/benefit.html).”
Or, as the Open Source Inititiative puts it:”The foundation of the business case for open-source is high reliability. Open-source software is peer-reviewed software; it is more reliable than closed, proprietary software. Mature open-source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets(http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php).”
