About Open Source
Open source software is developed in much the same way scientific research is conducted. Scientists openly publish their work, which is open to scrutiny by their peers. Other scientists can build and extend on earlier published work, progressively building a powerful body of work and a knowledgeable community to support it.
The benefits of the open source approach are increasingly being recognised in the ICT sector both here in New Zealand and overseas. These benefits include:
- lower barriers to investment: open source software has enabled many organisations to invest in high-end business tools that would previously have been beyond reach
- controlling your IT future: open source software can be tailored to your needs: you aren't dependent on a single-vendor's idea of what its customers' needs are
- security and reliability: because open source software can be scrutinised by anyone, the development community behind well-supported open source projects is typically quick to respond to security issues and other bugs; your own organisation or your technology supplier can also review the code against your internal policies and standards.
- innovation: organisations are able to build on established open source products to create innovative solutions that significantly improve outcomes from service delivery across sectors to competitive advantage for individual businesses.
For reasons like these, many organisations are no longer asking "Is open source ready for my business?" but rather "Is my business ready for open source?".
In fact today most organisations already use open source software either directly (nearly 70% of web servers use the open source Apache product) or indirectly (most of the infrastructure of the Internet is built on open source). Compared with some years ago, there is now such a wide variety of software available that organisations can look beyond a handful of high-cost proprietary offerings to meet almost every business need.
For some organisations, the diversity of open source offerings available today, can be an obstacle to adoption. How do you choose one from dozens of freely available web content management systems? How do you assess the strength of the development community behind the project? How can you best integrate the product into your existing IT environment? How do you feed your organisation's innovations back into an open source project to minimise the long-term maintenance cost to you?
A trusted technology partner like Catalyst is invaluable in selecting, implementing and supporting the right open source software for your business needs.
For more information about open source software: