Reasons for Open Source
Last week I taught a class at Rutgers for LIS students. I explained what open source was and why you’d want to use it versus the traditional proprietary options. Of course I talked about the community and visions behind open source software - I also dispelled some common myths people have.
When giving these talks I like to pull data from many different sources, that’s why it’s a shame I didn’t find this post before my talk. Matthew McCullough talks about why companies should ‘chose open source software in the current state of our industry.’
Open source is gaining momentum like never before in the most respected of institutions and enterprises. Originally, the choice to use open source was made only by smaller companies for strictly financial reasons. Those reasons still hold, but are now joined by a chorus of other great points in the current intellectual property, commercial vendor, and economic state that the business world is currently in.
Interoperability is strongest in the Open Source realm. Open Source enjoys the absence of financial motivations to close data inputs, and the existence of desire to have adopters join in and migrate from other open and closed platforms. You’ll find that there are numerous import & migration tools for your existing data, and you’ll discover that your data is stored in highly interoperable formats for future migration to any platform your business needs dictate.
Read the entire post here.