Many companies are moving away from proprietary software, instead, using software that is developed and maintained by a community of software developers and end users. Still, many are skeptical of using free software for their business applications. We’ve outlined major reasons why we choose to use open source software as a foundation for our business and consulting services and hopefully you’ll come to understand how it can benefit your business.
Time to implement is much quicker. Because the software that we use is open source we have full capability to install and modify any of the existing code to fit our clients requirements; thus bypassing an approval process from any 3rd party software providers. And because it takes less time to implement our clients solutions we can save them a great deal of money in consulting and development fees. This is in addition to the costs that they would normally have had to pay on top of licensing fees from the would be software provider.
A side effect to this that many people don’t realize is that when you use open source software the pool of available developers is often increased, meaning you can find quality help for a lower cost. With many proprietary systems the company you buy the software from will require you to use their in-house developers to make any changes to your implementation; good luck getting that work done for a reasonable cost and within your time requirements.
Continual improvement of code base. Open source software is powered by a community of developers, many of whom receive financial backing by companies looking to implement the software in their own businesses. Much of the code that gets written by these developers is then contributed back for others to use. Why not benefit from the code that other companies have paid professionals to develop?
Drupal specifically, is a project that has benefitted greatly from monetary contributions by large companies. Drupal powers sites such as: MTV.co.uk, Warner Brothers Records, Forbes, Sony BMG, and many more. All of these large scale projects have contributed work back to the Drupal community, allowing everyone involved the opportunity to benefit from their work.
If these reasons aren’t enough to get you to consider using open software, we recommend you read up more at the references below.
