23 January 2012
Open source development simply means that many related developers collaboratively produce software for free distribution, improvement, and use for anyone willing to abide by the software license. Software licenses are those such as the GNU general public license or GPL, or the lesser general public license or LGPL. Commercial software, however, is developed by programmers that are employed by a company for the purpose of creating something that will be sold and whose code is protected through several intellectual property mechanisms, like a patent or a copyright, which makes that code inaccessible to the buyer.

The open source model allows for better and more improved software because it encourages more innovation. The developers are given the freedom to contribute to open projects in order to gain a reputation among their peers. There are also some developers who gain money through donations from users or through support or training contracts. An Open source solution provider has much lower costs and this model is ideal for startups and home users.

The most important advantages of an open source solution provider would be the cost, its security, and the flexibility. Open source solutions, along with their source codes which are available for public scrutiny, are much more secure than commercial software solutions, whose codes are not published and cannot be viewed. Developers can find weaknesses in the code and fix them. Majority of open source software have large and active communities behind their development which makes them much more reliable, more efficient, and more secure than commercial software. Anything developed and shared as open source will be put under the care of open source customization making it more viable for improvement.

These solutions are much more flexible for the customer over commercial software because the software can be examined by an open source solution provider and some slight changes or alterations can be made to the code to effect the changes necessary for the behavior of the system desired by the customer. This will allow a technically savvy customer to potentially identify any kind of problem within the system and ask for help from open source customization teams to deal with these problems in the system to make them much more suitable for the customer.

Fixes for bugs and other solutions come in a greater variety of sources. They can come about through community effort and distributed through channels like discussion groups. These fixes are refined and improved by the community if the initial fixes by an open source solution provider are not adequate.

OpenOffice.org, and Linux are examples of the most famous and used solutions. They are widely used and are very well known for their stability when compared with Microsoft products. There are a lot of commercial firms that market free solutions and generate a profit from support. One example of such a firm is Trixbox. This is an IP PBX with the community edition distributed for free. There is also a professional edition that has more features and support that is provided but it comes with a fee.

Wikipedia utilizes the mediawiki that was developed by the Wikimedia foundation. This foundation is running a large encyclopedia that relies on donations to survive with volunteer developers who work for free. Even Facebook uses the same development model for its development. The PHP server side scripting is used and their site is hosted on Apache web server on a Linux server. Ever since the Internet had come along, open source web development programs along with open source customization has been getting more popular. Everybody wants a virtual presence and this triggered an open source development program that is created and managed by the public.

The web development industry is known to be the fastest developing industry today. It is accessible from anywhere in the world and those who are looking to develop a website of their own are looking towards open source development programs and an open source solution provider. It is also known that some opensource web applications that are developed by web development companies along with offshore software development companies, quite similar to some commercial applications, have a tendency to die out quite quickly. A typical scenario would have an open source solution provider losing interest and giving up on some projects.

This leads to these products not gaining any attention from open source customization and eventually becomes forgotten. It is most commonly offshore outsourcing companies that receive these complaints that often concern support issues. Online bugs hamper these applications and the buyer of such an application would be forced to contact the developer for support. When the vendor is unavailable, the buyer will usually have to look for another open source solution provider and have them get rid of any bugs in the defective software. Regardless of such mishaps, an open source solution provider will always be sought after so long as they have a solid reputation.