Small businesses and startups nowadays constantly look for the ways that offer faster development at lower operating costs while facilitating innovation. One such optimal way to achieve this is to embrace the power of open source software to boosts their business growth.
Open source communities provide low-cost innovations in the early stage of development and tests new capabilities. Furthermore, the ecosystem of the open source leads to control and liability back to the development teams. All of this sums up to a competitive edge for businesses that use open source software.
How does open source collaboration pave the way for innovation?
Take an example of Wikipedia, where instead of a few editors, it has various registered editors. Contrary to the books that consume a lot of time to edit, reset, and reprint, Wikipedia gets updated in a real time. The online encyclopedia is a community-powered platform, a living document that regularly gets better and more precise.
In the same way, innovation happens in the open source community. Updates to an existing software are powered by collaboration among a huge group of enthusiasts and specialists that are interlinked, much credits to social media. The final result is the technology that improves rapidly and a community of support that can even be millions of people.
Benefits for small businesses
You may be desirous to assume that all this is dull, an unnecessary thing that is relevant to the developers and computer programmers, but in actual it has valuable advantages and applications for SMBs and startups.
Flexibility
Businesses get the benefits of using open source applications, as they have the freedom to select the solutions that result best for them, without the need to secure the deals. Further, based on the requirements, they can customise.
Affordability
While open source code often necessitates the deployment costs, software support and maintenance, open source licenses are freely available – benefits businesses with more resources to hire expert developers who can do the required work.
Security
Despite the fact that open source code vulnerabilities get exposed to everyone – the hackers too, there is an active debate over how an open source model supports a higher level of security.
A small team manages proprietary software at a company contrary to the open source projects which are frequently and actively maintained by a vast community of specialists who can identify the security vulnerabilities much more quickly.
Sustainability
Unlike the proprietary software, major of open source software gets regularly updated by the community that manages it. This feature provides the businesses the ability to improve their products instead of replacing them and at last, dropping them behind.
Reliability
As numerous experts maintain open source technology without the overhead expenses that other solutions burdens, they are often more reliable.
Speed
In the world of development, time is money. The communities behind open source products offer the businesses and developers with the good fortune to move quickly.
It is essential to regard that few open source projects are poorly composed and may contain vulnerabilities and another issue. Eventually, many of these projects drop after a few years, which can leave you trapped with code that is on the verge of collapse.
Keeping the above things noted – while embracing the benefits of open source, it’s essential to get the point the about selecting the open source technologies that have an active developer and community support and hold commitment for the upcoming years.
