I attended the Flourish open source conference on Saturday, which had a great lineup of interesting speakers.
The first talk of the day was "Why Open Source" by Ray Hightower, founder of WisdomGroup.
In his talk, Ray described four reasons to use open source that clients, customers, and employers can understand.
Reason #1: Valuable Publicity
Companies that create and open-source tools establish themselves as thought leaders and get very valuable publicity, Ray told the audience. For example, Chicago-based Basecamp (formerly 37signals) grew to be the #1 project management tool, in large part due to publicity generated from the popular open-source web development framework Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails was created by Basecamp co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson.
Braintree, another Chicago-based tech company, got some attention within the local developer community when it launched Repsheet, its open-source anti-fraud tool.
Reason #2: No Need to Wait for Vendor Fixes
Another key reason to use open source software, Ray told the audience, is that there is no need to wait on a vendor for crucial bug fixes or new features.
With closed-source third-party software, your company is at the mercy of a software vendor who may have different priorities. A software vendor may take days, weeks, or even months to release a patch to fix a crucial bug or implement a key new feature.
In the worst case, the third-party vendor may have gone out of business or shut down the software product. In this case you are, as they say, shit out of luck.
However, if you are using open source software, if you find a critical bug you can hop into the source code yourself and fix it on your own—no need to wait on any vendors.
When you work with open source and you discover new requirements not met by the software, it’s your shining opportunity to give something back. Rather than just sit around idle waiting for some vendor to fix your problems, you get the unique chance of being a steward of your own destiny. To become a participant in the community rather than a mere spectator...The barriers to contribution are exceptionally low.—David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of Ruby on Rails
Reason #3: Cheap Multiprocessor Parallel Environment
We are in the golden age of computing. Today, you can buy a Raspberry Pi computer for less than $40 including shipping.
One of the things that you can do with these cheap little computers is you can string them together to make your very own supercomputer.
Southampton computational engineer Professor Simon Cox and his six-year-old son built their own 64-processor supercomputer by linking together 64 Raspberry Pis. For less than £2,500 ($4,154) they built their own supercomputer, which has 64 processors and 1 terabyte of memory.
“The team wants to see this low-cost system as a starting point to inspire and enable students to apply high-performance computing and data handling to tackle complex engineering and scientific challenges as part of our on-going outreach activities.”—Professor Simon Cox
The team used the open-source Debian Wheezy operating system, a flavor of Linux. If they had used a paid, proprietary operating system such as Windows, they would have needed to purchase a license for each of the 64 processors—which would have been prohibitively expensive.
So if you want to build your own supercomputer—and who wouldn't want her own supercomputer?—you should use Linux.
Reason #4: Collaboration Drives Better Results
Popular open-source projects have many experienced developers and testers working on them from many different countries. For example, the Linux kernel has roughly 1400 developers contributing to it. As a result of this remote collaboration, open source projects are able to accomplish much more than a single team within a single company could.
For example, according to a 2011 estimate, it would cost roughly $3 billion for a private company to redevelop the Linux kernel.