Open Source Software: Risks and Rewards V2.0, 03 August 2005
Open Source Software: Risks and Rewards v2.0, 03 August 2005 Author(s)Gary Hein Conclusion Open source software (OSS) brings new opportunities and risks to information technology (IT) vendors and customers. Software commoditization is being profoundly affected from the infrastructure layer and moving up to the application layer. As a result, OSS is changing the strategies and business models of hardware and software vendors and system integrators. Customers should understand the risks and rewards of OSS, and should formulate strategies that bring OSS benefits to their IT departments while mitigating the business and legal risks. Synopsis Open source software (OSS) is more than just free software. It’s a development process, a distribution model, and a set of new software licenses. And, as characterized by OSS proponents, it’s a movement. OSS projects, such as Linux and Apache HTTP server, are commoditizing enterprise and Internet infrastructure, and thus pose threats for some vendors while creating new market opportunities for others. OSS brings more to information technology (IT) than just free software. It grants freedom from vendor lock-in and application churn, freedom to inspect, modify, and improve source code, and the freedom to influence or contribute to projects key to a company’s survival. But these freedoms come at a price. Although OSS is free, it isn’t always less expensive to implement due to migration, support, training, and maintenance costs. OSS projects add new twists to business risks such as vendor viability and stability, and legal issues remain uncertain as many popular licenses have yet to be tested in a court of law.
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