Advantages of using Open Source in the Company
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I work with IT teams that are so passionate about Red Hat's open source mission that they bring a "default to open source" mentality to every project we work on. We have been quite successful in finding open source solutions for many of our business needs. Of course, we rely on our own open source solutions for our operating system, middleware and cloud needs. In addition, we always look first for open source solutions for our other business needs, such as user authorization and telephony.
Through this first-hand experience, I thought about the reasons why open source is a good fit for the company.
Here are some basic advantages that I believe open source offers over proprietary solutions:
Flexibility and Agility
IT managers must always ensure flexibility and agility in their company. If you can't keep up with agility, you will be left behind by the competition. Open source enables technological agility and usually offers several ways to solve problems. Open source helps ensure that your IT organization is not blocked because a particular feature is not available from a vendor. Instead of waiting for the vendor to deliver that capability, you can create it yourself.
As another example, I could set up an OpenStack instance today, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux instance or the community counterpart to it, or a MongoDB instance, and I could do it myself with the open source software freely available over the Internet. I could start by building a project or platform, testing its feasibility, or developing my skills.
If I tried this with similar proprietary products from VMware or Microsoft or Oracle, I would spend days or weeks just negotiating terms and fees just to get started. Or at the very least, I would have to go through an extensive process to complete some kind of pilot project with your sales organization.
Speed
Your company will soon be competing for speed, if it isn't already. Open Source enables speed. A big advantage of open source is the ability to take the community versions, start understanding if they can solve your business problem, and immediately start delivering value. Once you have made this decision, you will have access to increasingly professional support and services for open source products, especially those supported by Red Hat.
This gives you the best of both worlds - flexibility, agility, and the ability to get started quickly and cost-effectively, with the ability to mature to a large-scale, fully supported, enterprise-quality implementation without having to overcome proprietary licensing hurdles.
Cost Effectiveness
Open Source is generally much more cost-effective than a proprietary solution. Not only are open source solutions generally much more cost-effective in an enterprise environment with equivalent or superior capabilities, they also give companies the opportunity to start small and work on a large scale (more on this soon). Given that companies often face budget constraints, it only makes financial sense to explore open source solutions.
Ability to start small
With open source, you can start small and quickly with community versions and then migrate to a commercially supported solution when your business needs drive you there. If the project does not require support, you can continue with the community version indefinitely. You have the opportunity to try the different alternatives, choose the one that will work, and then scale with a commercial solution.
Solid Information Security
Commercial open source has a solid record of information security in a dangerous world. Of course, it is difficult to claim security superiority for any solution and it is a challenging environment for all of us, but the responsiveness of the open source community and vendors to information security issues has been very good. The fact that we were looking at code that in some cases is decades old, and that we were able to identify and fix problems as they became apparent, rather than allowing the code to get moldy in a proprietary environment where few knew of the vulnerability but some exploited it, is one of the advantages of open source.
Attracting Better Talent
Open source gives companies the opportunity to attract better talent. Most professional technologists are well aware of open source, and many believe that the industry is moving in this direction. Many enjoy creating their own projects and have the ability to interact with others outside their company to develop solutions. Giving developers flexibility and freedom can be an important tool for attracting better talent.
Share Maintenance Costs
You can solve your business problems while effectively sharing part of the maintenance costs. One of the fundamental advantages of open source is the involvement of the community. Instead of writing an application and having to maintain it yourself, you can spread the cost of maintaining and servicing applications among several parties.
The Future
Open Source is the future. Web, mobile and cloud solutions are increasingly based predominantly on an open source infrastructure. Some data and analysis solutions are only available as open source.
Future architectures will most likely be based on open source, as is currently the case for mobile solutions with the Android platform; web solutions, where the vast majority of websites are based on open source technology; and cloud solutions, where almost all of them, with the exception of Microsoft's cloud, are also based on open source solutions.
Open source is a good investment in the future.
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