What is Open Source?
On this page have we make some generalization to make it simple for people who are new to the Open Soure concepts.
Briefly we can state that
Open Source software are software that comply with the following rules:
- Free redistribution: The freedom to redistribute the software both for free or commercial purpose.
- Source Code: The freedom to access and read the source code
- Modification: The freedom to make changes and modification to the software (source code) and to redistribute the modificated software under the same license terms as the original software.
- Right to use: The freedom for the end user to use the software in anyway and for any purpose they like, i.e there is no restriction for commercial companies and organization to use Open Source software and to make money out of it.
Example of good
Open Source products are the Operating System
Linux, the Web server
Apache, the file-server
Samba, the database server
MySQL, Web/Email-client Mozilla, desktop system GNOME and KDE.
The benefits of Open Source
Companies and organizations wouldn't migrate to
Open Source products if
Open Source product didn't have a real business value for them,
Open Source software have many benefits both economical, functional and technical compared with commercial alternatives.
For both individuals, companies and organization
Open Source products often have the following benefits:
- Freedom: You have the freedom to make changes and adept the Open Source software, either by using your own IT/IS staff or by hire external consultants, to make the Open Source software better suit your business and your business model. For example you may lack a special feature in your ERP software, which will make you save hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, if you are using a commercial ERP software you may need to wait until the customer decide to implement the function but if you are using a Open Source software you have the freedom to make the change by yourself or hire and bunch of external consultant who make the change for you.
- No license fee (Free): No license cost, you don't need to pay any license cost for using Open Source products, this is the case both if you only need to install one copy of the product or if you need to install 10 000 copy of product you still don't pay anything for the license. However it is important to emphasize that no license fee isn't the same as free (even if that terms is often used for Open Source) you still need to pay for planning, installation, configuration, administration, management, education and support of your Open Source softwares either in the form of salaries, consulting fees or support fees to a commercial Open Source company .
- Vendor and supplier independence: This is a consequence from the freedom of Open Source but it is important to emphasize that Open Source software also mean vendor and supplier independence. With commercial software you often must buy support and consulting service from the vendor or from one of the vendor certificated reseller which lead to higher prices for consulting services and support but the biggest risk is if the vendor goes bankrupt when you will be left with a business-critical software that will not be develop and improved anymore and without any form of support, however software that is develop under a Open Source license will survive if companies go bankrupt because other companies can take over and continue with the development, support and consulting services.
- Open Standard: Open Source software often follow common and open standards more often than commercial alternatives do, Open Standards make it easier for companies and organization who use different product from different vendors to change information and data between them. Beside interoperability and integration open standards have also the advantage that it will function as some kind of guarantee for the future, one problem with commercial application that use closed and property standard is that it can be hard and costly to recover information created with the commercial application after some years if the vendor goes bankrupt or stop supporting the application, with Open Standards the IT expert have all information she/he need to recover the information for you.
- High Quality: Due to the public available source code of Open Source software will Open Source software often have higher quality and be more reliable and stable than commercial alternatives. The time to solve a bug and problem in a Open Source software is often considerable shorter than in commercial alternatives, the Open Source expert who find the bug can look in the source code and correct it at the same time instead of filling in a bug report to the vendor and wait months for the vendor to correct the bug and release a patch, often to get that service from your vendor you also need to buy extra support services from the vendor.
- Performance: Performance of Open Source products is often better compared with commercial alternatives. Open Source product often also require less hardware resource than commercial alternatives.
- Security: Due to the public available source code of Open Source software will Open Source software be reviewed more often and by more high skilled individuals all around the world than commercial alternatives, the consequence of this in the long run is that security bugs and flaws is found and correct faster in Open Source software than in commercial alternatives. For you as the customer and end user of Open Source software it mean that Open Source product often will be more secure than commercial alternatives.
- Cost-effectiveness (Lower TCO): Even if the total cost of implementing and manage Open Source software in an organization isn't zero (0), can still Open Source software be very cost-effective,lower the TCO and increase the business-value for the most companies and organizations. The reason why Open Source software can be very cost-effective as well as increasing the business-value for companies and organization are all the reason we have mention above, for example no license fee, freedom to adept the software to better suit a organization business model, freedom to choice the best supplier of consultant and support service for Open Source product, better reliability and availability of Open Source lead to lower cost for firefighting in the IT/IS group, lower hardware requirement and better performance and so on.
It is important to emphasize that not all
OpenSource products is mature and of high quality, some of the
OpenSource products are in the early development phase and haven't reach the same quality as
OpenSource product that have been develop for years like
Linux,
Apache and Samba. That's why you should hire a expert, like us, who can help and guide you in the migration process to
OpenSource products.
Is OpenSource for everyone?
Yes,
Open Source can be for everyone both for computers geeks, individuals, small and large companies, even non IT companies and organizations can benefit from
Open Source software.
So even if you are not an IT/IS engineer you shouldn't be frighten for learning more about
Open Source and what
Open Source can do for you and your company.
Migration to OpenSource from commercial products
We can assist and help organization who are thinking or planning to migrate the entire or part of their IT/IS infrastructure to
OpenSource based solutions such as but not limited to
Linux,
OpenOffice,
Apache, Samba. We have long experience from
OpenSource and
OpenSource can help and guide our customer so they make the right decision so they can build a secure, reliable, TCO-friendly and cost-effective IT/IS infrastructure on OpenSoure
? software.
A common mistake made by companies and organization who are interested and thinking about starting to migrate to
OpenSource products are that they need to migrate their entire IT/IS infrastructure at once to
OpenSource products or that they need to run
OpenSource Operating Systems like
Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD before they can start to use and benefit from
OpenSource products. Nothing could be more wrong, there is no problem for a company or organization to start and test out one
OpenSource product in their existing IT/IS infrastructure, for example could a company start to use the MicroSoft
? Office replacement
OpenOffice on some Windows desktop or replace their Windows NT or 2000 file-server with a
Linux server running Samba. When a customer have tested a
OpenSource product, like
Samba with
Linux, for a while and saw that
OpenSource product was at least as good as the commercial alternatives, they can continue on the
OpenSource path and implement more and more
OpenSource product in the organization like
OpenOffice,
Linux based servers and firewalls and in the end replace their Windows based desktop with either a
OpenSource based Thin Clients or with
Linux based desktops.
A problem with new users of
OpenSource product could be to decide which
OpenSource product to use, which
OpenSource product a mature to use in a business-critical IT/IS infrastructure for the customer? We have long experience from
OpenSource so we can help and guide our customer to select the right
OpenSource product for their needs.
In the long-term a successful migration to
OpenSource product often mean that the customer lowered
TCO for their IT/IS infrastructure as well as increasing the reliability, availability, serviceability and business-value of their IT/IS infrastructure.
A brief example of a migration process for a customer are:
- Workshop in OpenSource and OpenSource products for both management and IT/IS staff.
- Investigation of the customer IT/IS infrastructure to find out how the customer can benefit from OpenSource
- Discussion with customer and together with the customer decide a OpenSource strategy and road map.
- Detail migration project plan
- Education of the customer employees, both IT/IS staff as well as non IT/IS staff, on OpenSource products like OpenOffice, Linux, Apache, Samba, Postfix etc.
- Implementation of OpenSource products in the customer IT/IS infrastructure
- Testing phase and evaluation phase of OpenSource
- Switch to the OpenSource products
- Review of the migration project together with the customer
- Ongoing education of the customer IT/IS staff in new OpenSource products and new release of OpenSource products.
Our OpenSource services
Our employees are high skilled technicals with long experience from different
OpenSource product and building high quality, secure, reliable, cost-effective solutions based on
OpenSource products.
Example of different
OpenSource services we can offer for both small, medium and large enterprise are:
For more information about our competence see the
competence and our consulting services, see the
consulting page.
