What Open Source Software Means to your Small Business
It’s been such an old hat to blog again (and again) about the super dooper advantages of getting your software out of the box. Many IT advising bloggers waste efforts to convince business owners of the superiority of OSS (Open Source Software) compared to proprietary solutions. And most of times, business owners will look down at us like we’d be a sect or something. Well, perception is a too humane feature for a web.point blog ranting about small biz related IT matters.
What hit me yesterday was this article: The Business Case for Open Source Software, posted on infoworld.com
It’s speaking the business people language and not the geeky IT crypto-blah we’ve been accustomed with on slashdot.com - take this for instance:
So what else is there to Open Source Software? Why does my company q!Bang Solutions try to pursuade our clients to use OSS when possible? It’s the end of licensing restrictions that tell you how you can use your software. Tired of obtaining license keys from your software vendors every year or even every month just to keep your software running? Feel like your vendor is holding you hostage via your software licensing? With OSS, you never have to enter another annoying license code ever again. They just don’t exist in the world of OSS. You don’t even have to keep track of silly license validity seals or your purchasing paperwork to prove ownership. Never again will you fear the BSA (Business Software Alliance, not the Boy Scouts!) knocking on your door wanting to perform a software audit. The BSA even takes out advertisements on Google search pages for and up to $200,000 reward a disgruntled ex-employee can receive for reporting your company to the BSA! That’s quite a powerful motivator.
Bang! indeed (the author picked up a telling name for his OSS company: q!Bang).
Or this excerpt:
I know that we’ve all been in the situation where you’re waiting on a new feature to be released from your proprietary software vendor. They promised it would be available two months ago, and they’ve been “working around the clock” to finish it, blah, blah, blah… In the world of Open Source Software, if you can’t wait on someone else’s schedule for a new feature, then you add that feature yourself. What? You don’t have programmers on staff? You can always outsource to a programming company and have them do it for you. Even better, you can pay the software project’s developers to add the feature. Many OSS developers aren’t accustomed to being paid for their efforts, so money can be a great motivator. The point is that you always have some options.
If you’re the owner of a small business shop -and you’re using computers- then you gotta read this article, right now. Then stop, breathe, and think…
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