Wall Street is looking to Open Source software amid the current financial crisis. In this article from WallStreet and Technology titled Wall Street Opens Doors to Open Source Technologies the author Ivy Schmerken explains the merits of using Open Source software on business. Of course it comes as no surprise that the motivating factor is cost. Yet interestingly in the article the author explains that companies are also looking beyond cost and saying the community driven efforts are helping the bottom line as well. Often times the community is providing a technical support relationship and even goes as far as getting support from competitors.
One Open Source project that is featured is the R-project being used by a predictive analytics user. There is belief that Open Source will surpass proprietary projects in shear volume of contribution and evolve more quickly with technological advancement. From the article...
"People realize now that the open source project -- which really has worldwide buy-in from top experts from whatever field -- is perhaps a more secure and future-proof method of development than going with a proprietary vendor who can never keep with the worldwide community," says Colin Magee, VP sales and marketing at Revolution ComputingOpen Source software will have a large impact on how the economy rebounds. The cost is hard to compete. The support from the community is very difficult to replicate. Now the article does mention there are skeptics to Open Source success as there could be hidden costs. I find the argument could be made the same for proprietary projects. I only see Open Source to continue to make an impact in the business market place.
2 comments:
While some open source projects are much better than others, most projects do have at least better support for small and medium business than most proprietary vendors. There was a time I worked for a vendor that should not be confused with California or Canada (subtle joke). This vendor mainly looked at what the fortune 500 wanted and could care less about all other users.
This vendor also would charge extra for support. I was on one of the extra charge for support groups. I gave the best service I could but developers upstream from me did not give me the time of day unless I got a manager involved. With open source, the developers are normally involved with the support. So there were a lot of times where I got better support from a forum for an open source product than I could get from my own company.
Being also on the inside of this large software vendor, while we sold proprietary software, guess what a lot for developers where running? Various open source tools. The Eclipse IDE, Firefox, a ton of Linux servers and VMs, OpenSSH, Ethereal/Wireshark, Analog (The Web logfile analysis program), and this is the stuff I saw/used.
Funny how that happens. That is the main reason why I started this blog. I wanted to focus on the tools that we use to get the job done. Sometimes it might be proprietary. Yet more and more I'm finding that the collaborate effort, community support, and not to forget the cost has me coming back to Open Source software.
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