How might open-source software benefit a small business

They also have a worldwide community of developers and users at their disposal for help with that. When your business uses proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows and Office, you are on a treadmill that requires you to keep upgrading both software and hardware ad infinitum. Open source software, on the other hand, is typically much less resource-intensive, meaning that you can run it well even on older hardware.

Open source software is much better at adhering to open standards than proprietary software is. The visibility of the code behind open source software, however, means you can see for yourself and be confident.

Open source software is generally free, and so is a world of support through the vibrant communities surrounding each piece of software. Most every Linux distribution, for instance, has an online community with excellent documentation, forums, mailing lists, forges, wikis, newsgroups and even live support chat. For businesses that want extra assurance, there are now paid support options on most open source packages at prices that still fall far below what most proprietary vendors will charge.

Providers of commercial support for open source software tend to be more responsive, too, since support is where their revenue is focused.

Between the purchase price of the software itself, the exorbitant cost of mandatory virus protection, support charges, ongoing upgrade expenses and the costs associated with being locked in, proprietary software takes more out of your business than you probably even realize. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

This last point is more important than you might think: yes, a solution has to fit your requirements. But requirements change as the market matures and your business evolves. If the product doesn't change with them, you have a costly migration ahead. How do you know you're not putting your time and money into a product that is dying? In open source, you don't have to take a vendor at its word.

You can compare vendors by looking at the development velocity and health of the community that's developing it. A more active, diverse, and healthy community will result in a better product one or two years down the line—an important thing to consider. Of course, as this blog about enterprise open source points out, the vendor must be capable of handling the instability that comes from innovation within the development project.

Look for a vendor with a long support cycle to avoid that upgrade mill. Whenever you have to migrate to a new vendor, you incur huge costs, so it's best to avoid products that only one vendor can sustain. Open source enables communities to build software collaboratively. For example, OpenStack is built by dozens of companies and individual volunteers , providing customers certainty that, no matter what happens to any individual vendor, there will always be a vendor available to provide support.

With open source, a business makes a long-term investment in the development team's efforts to implement the product. Access to the source code ensures that you will always be able to hire someone from the pool of contributors to keep your deployment alive as long as you need it.

Of course, without a big, active community there are few contributors to hire from, so the number of people actively contributing is important. Security is a complicated thing, which is why open development is a key factor and a precondition for creating secure solutions. And security is getting more important every day. When development happens in the open, you can directly verify if a vendor is actively pursuing security and watch how it treats security issues.

The ability to study the source and perform independent code audits makes it possible to find and fix security issues early.

Some vendors offer bug bounties of thousands of dollars as extra incentive for the community to uncover security flaws and to show confidence in their products. Beyond code, open development also means open processes, so you can check and see whether a vendor follows baseline industry-standard development processes recommended by ISO, Cloud Security Principles and others.

Of course, an external review by a trusted party, like we at Nextcloud did with the NCC Group , offers additional assurance.