Open source is the new paid. Open source software are putting their paid counterparts in a tough competition, and then outweighing them in it. It makes inquisitive minds (such as mine) wonder sometimes;

Why on earth a software model, frowned upon by businesses and individuals alike, gained popularity in such a short time?

Even though a case study published on the opensource.org explains it, I’ll search for an answer independently.

Freedom of choice

That’s right, and that makes all the differences. Businesses, especially the large ones had a predilection for paid software in the past. But of late they’ve realized paid software vendors want to secure the market from their non-paid alternatives, which narrows down their choice.

The computer hardware vendors faced a similar problem in the 90s. They all had to work on their hardware keeping in mind Windows as the default OS. But after various distros of Linux made their presence felt, many vendors kept their platforms open for dual booting.

Similarly, clients want the freedom to choose between vendors. The paid software developer agencies are reluctant to give them this choice, whereas Open Source is its middle name. So, many companies are embracing open source solutions.

Better collaboration

Think of a CRM, a client management software or a portal exclusively for developers, such as GitHub. In a company environment, such software are to be used by a number of employees. A paid CRM or a paid CMS restricts the number of users for obvious reasons, but an open source alternative will never impose any such restriction.

The result? Employees better collaborate with each other, and the work gets done with ease. The paid software developers regulate collaboration because that’s the way for them to drive the profit margin up. The open source developers, on the other hand, follow an altogether different model to generate revenues. Their model never meddles with smooth collaboration.

Cost-effectiveness

Shrug off the misconception that businesses of large scale don’t give two hoots about saving money. That's not true, they are quite serious about it. Since adopting open source software solutions significantly cuts down on the operational budget, it is their new found love.

NetFlix is a great example of this. The online media streaming platform charges its subscribers a mere $8 a month because as put by Jeffrey Hammond, a Forrester analyst referring to a research report “Everything is built on open-source software. They focused on content, not building an operating system or a testing framework.”

Small and medium size businesses are all into open source because managing the operational cost is an annoying problem for most of them, and open source gives them a break from it.

Quality improvement

It was a prevalent thought earlier that open source lacks quality. But as more and more people are becoming familiar with FOSS, the arguments to snub open source are no longer put up for sale.

Open source assures quality. The developer communities backing open source are always alert. They can help users solving problems, and finding bugs. More so, by taking feedback from the users, those communities improve upon the qualitative aspects of the software, and make the next versions more efficient.

Business agility

Besides cost, agility provokes businesses to welcome open source with open arms. By being agile, a business enjoys the leverage of quickly reacting to marketplace demands. Open source guarantees agility in more ways than one. It frees a business from the following constraints:

• Time consuming life-cycle of the software development process.
• Writing codes from scratch.
• Licensing agreements.

Many new dynamics that were unheard of earlier, are currently at play and they can reshape the industry any day. Unless agile, a business will have a difficult time coping with the marketplace changes.

No compromise on security

So here we are addressing the most dreaded aspect of open source - security. Slammed by paid software vendors as less secure, open source has long been stigmatized by businesses as well as by ordinary users. But the developer communities have silently worked on their product interfaces and made them more secure.

The latest Wordpress versions, for example, offer better security than the previous ones. Developers are releasing new plugins every day, which can make the security arrangements robust. Many businesses have Wordpress sites, they keep a Wordpress developers on a dedicated basis, so he regularly updates the plugins and monitors the site’s security.

So…

Open source is no longer alien to the business communities. Like paid software, open source software come with upsides and downsides. There are scores of tools for businesses to fix the downsides while the upsides can aid them.