24 September 2009
The maturing of Open Source products and how they can benefit both web designers and their customers

If you don’t know what Open Source is, in its simplest terms it's free software that belongs to everyone. You can use it, adapt it, share it, sell it on to anyone.

Almost every web design project we complete these days uses Open Source software at its core. Take for example the Open Source CMS - Joomla. Joomla is a fantastic award winning content management system for web sites that is free to use and has many thousands of extensions that can be plugged in to it to extend its features.

Many customers are wary of Open Source. They can’t understand how it can be given away free and people still make money from it. The point is, all users and developers of open source code share in the benefits. They can then pass on those benefits to their customers by offering functionally rich web solutions at a fraction of the cost they were able to do only a few years ago.

It wasn’t that long ago that even we were sceptical about Open Source products. At that time the market hadn’t matured enough. These days there is a plethora of solutions to choose from, all very robust, feature rich with large communities based around them. We’re so committed to it that we have developed Open Source products ourselves that are free for the web design community to use.

Therefore it was heartening to see the UK Government is now backing Open Source for use in public services. The Australian Government did a similar thing a few years ago. Both governments see the benefits in value for money, freedom and robustness of the solutions.

Only the other week we had an interesting conversation with a customer who hadn’t heard of Open Source and was sceptical about the benefits. Hopefully the backing of Open Source by the UK Government will go some way to showing how mature the market is and how much of a no-brainer it is. It’s win-win for everyone.