Thursday, April 3, 2014

Why OS (Open Source)?

Some reasons why we like to use open source software (thanks Firstborn tech guys):

Code is available to peer review for quality, security audits, bugs, etc. Fixing these issues is dramatically quicker on open source projects. It’s in the whole community’s interest to work together to make a project better and more resilient.

Code is available to extend or fix by our team or the general community if needed.

No licensing costs for utilizing the technology. For server technology this can make a pretty big difference if you need to deploy on multiple production servers.

If a technology becomes discontinued, the larger community can continue patching / supporting it as opposed to being at the mercy of the technology owner.

Knowledge sharing, stand on the shoulders of giants instead of reinventing the wheel (this is especially true for libraries and frameworks). People spend a lot of time working on solutions and abstractions that you can use for free.

Support is generally easier because of source code visibility, large online community and documentation. A lot of larger open source projects have foundations / consulting services to offer support to big companies if they want to pay for it. If your pockets are deep enough you can get official support for MySQL, RedHat, etc. from the creators/maintainers.



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