The Open Source Dilemma

In recent years, it has become common for many people to tout open source products and technologies for anything and everything in the modern business, and it often sounds too good to be true. While these products and technologies clearly have benefits, are there drawbacks, and how serious are they?

Like most technology decisions, going with an open source platform can be a double-edged sword. Many products from the open source community are just as powerful and capable as commercial products; while providing COMPUTER REPAIR BATON ROUGE, I see many people moving from commercial platforms like Adobe PhotoShop or Microsoft Office to an open-source alternative like GIMP or OpenOffice.

At the same time, things are frequently more difficult than they appear. There are differences in the way different applications operate, sometimes significant and obvious, other times subtle and unnoticed. The most visible changes create a retraining issue, where your employees need to relearn how the tasks they do every day are accomplished in the new software. The subtle changes can result in lost work, sometimes significant, because assumptions that were true about the old software simply are not true in the new.

One of the great myths of open source products is that they are subject to more security flaws than other software. This is another double-edged sword; open source software, because it is updated and released frequently, will indeed have more problems than commercial software. However, these same flaws exist in commercial software as well – they are simply identified and fixed internally, before an update is released.

It is a constant balancing act between how much time the team spends looking for problems, and how much time the user – you – spends having access to the updated technology.  The open source world generally prefers to give the user access quickly, while the commercial world prefers to employ rigorous testing.

While providing COMPUTER REPAIR BATON ROUGE, I’ve seen many customer sites work well with open source technologies rather than commercial technologies, but the single largest question – and one that is infrequently asked – is why, exactly, the move to open source is being made.

In the past several years, there’s been a real use of “open source” as little more than a buzzword. It seems self-evident that open source technology has benefits, but at the same time, few people bother to consider what those benefits are… and whether they need them.

One frequent need for IT SUPPORT IN LOUISIANA comes as a result of companies moving from one technology platform to another, not because it has a clear business benefit, but because a particular technology is new or seems “cool” to use. In the end, a lot of time and energy is spent trying to move from the old system to the new one, and the new system rarely has the same functionality as the old.

Keep in mind that what’s most important in any move from your current platform is not how cool the new system is, but the benefits it has for your business.

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