Red Hat is the most recognised commercial open source brand and is seeing significant growth year on year as open source products take off.
Open source products have been dogged by a reputation for unreliability and for a dubious audit trail for its intellectual property rights. This is a lawyer's nightmare when it comes to buying and selling companies because of the difficulty in making sure that a user is not unwittingly breaching someone else's rights.
Red Hat has nevertheless managed to carve a significant market for its product in the face of this reputation and is now taken as a mainstream provider, used by many organisations large and small.
Whether you are a company producing open source products or whether you are a company using them, it is essential that all of the implications of using open source are thought through strategically, having regard to the short, medium and long term aspirations of the organisation.
For users, the relative cheapness of open source products is clearly attractive. However, with the wrong provider, the disadvantages may outweigh the advantages.
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The quest for control is a serious problem in open source arena. The problem sometimes seems trivial, but is really a loss of manpower by the professionals developing programs in open source environment. The problem is seeking too much of control leads developers develop their own solutions for specific issues.
Reinventing the wheel is quite a common problem in open source arena. Instead of using an already popular script, developers tend to write there own scripts for specific tasks. There may be hundreds of scripts with similar functions. There are however instances when a developer has to come up with something new when the existing system doesn't give the expected results. Developing a code from scratch will be faster than modifying existing program.
Proprietary software, in this sense is quite advantageous here. The developers working with proprietary software hardly ever goes to coming up with their own script as a solution for immediate problems at hand. Then again, proprietary software developers too invent their own wheels, but the goal is to avoid nasty situations like legal problems.
The nature of shared development of software development appeals to the human nature to have control over their destiny. This is true even when they can get customized 'solutions' by proprietary software vendors. The future is in open source, but it is premature to make predictions as to when Linux or an open source OS cross runs on 50% of the computers of the world.
Incidentally Microsoft Corporation's Shared Source Program is an effort by the corporate giant to somehow win the trust of open source community. Though Microsoft allows a peek into the source code, redistribution rights are neither granted nor expected. Only an illusion of free handling of source code, shared source program lacks the democratic nature of all open source initiatives.
Back to open source initiatives - open source initiatives find it quite difficult to get professionally talented developers to the fold, especially in the beginning stages. This is true for almost all open source initiative. The situation reverses when there are enough people in the fold and the project takes momentum at SourceForge.net.
There is one last thought for major corporations that have become so stepping on open source shoulders ? spare some of your resources to enrich free software and open source software community.
Both Pete Arkwright & Sam Jose are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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