Why Open Source?

Why Open SourceThere are variety of good reasons to use open source technology when creating solutions for your business.

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): Using open source software yields a lower total cost of ownership when compared to closed source and proprietary alternatives.

Shift developers from low-value work to high-value work: The easy problems have already been solved by open source solutions. Operating systems, web servers, content management systems, and databases are all problems with established market leading open source solutions.

Modularity & Flexibility of key components: Proprietary software solutions tend to be monolithic, and you are not allowed to change how they function, or to add features that you need. Proprietary software locks users to a particular vendor, or “platform”. Open source projects tend to be more modularly architected, improving both the flexibility, and the robustness of the code. Open source solutions are typically leaner and more agile. Since you have access to the source code, you can often apply fixes or add features, both large and small, at your own convenience, not at the convenience of the publishing organization’s release cycle.

Secure & Transparent: Empirically, open source tends to produce better quality software than its proprietary or alternative counterparts. With closed source software, the only developers that can potentially detect, diagnose, triage, and resolve software bugs are those that happen to be employed by the company that publishes the software. Open source provides three advantages: first, you have the opportunity to tap the knowledge of the world’s best developers, not just those on one organization’s payroll. Second, the number of potentially contributing developers and thus the potential knowledge pool is orders of magnitude larger. Finally, open source software gets adapted to a variety of use cases, not just the one the publisher originally intended, surfacing bugs and edge cases much more rapidly than traditional, predictive QA processes.


Popular Open Source Software

The term “open source” refers to software whose source code is freely available to download, edit, use and share. There are a large number of open source applications for desktops, servers, and mobile devices.

While some of these free apps do not offer quite the same level of polished functionality as their commercial rivals, others far exceed the capabilities of everything else on the market.

With that in mind, here is a list of some of our favorite open source solutions.

Adobe Photoshop vs. The GIMP

Adobe Photoshop vs. The GIMP

The GIMP is a powerful and free open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop reigns supreme in image editing ...
Adobe Illustrator vs. Inkscape

Adobe Illustrator vs. Inkscape

Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor. It is used for creating or editing vector graphics, which are ...
Adobe Lightroom vs. Darkroom

Adobe Lightroom vs. Darkroom

Darktable is a free and open-source photography workflow application and raw developer. It is often considered a powerful alternative to ...
Python

Python

Python is an open source programming language that has gained immense popularity over the years. Known for its simplicity, readability, ...
Keras

Keras

Keras is an open source neural network library written in Python. Keras was conceived to be an interface rather than ...
TensorFlow

TensorFlow

TensorFlow was originally developed by the Google Brain Team within Google's Machine Intelligence research organization for machine learning and deep ...
LAMP Stack

LAMP Stack

LAMP is an acronym for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python". PHP (or Perl, Python) MySQL DataBase APACHE Web Server LINUX Operating ...
Linux

Linux

Linux is a family of free and open-source software operating systems built around the Linux kernel. The development of Linux ...
Apache HTTP Server

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server, typically called simply "Apache", is a free and open-source cross-platform web server. Apache is the most ...
MySQL

MySQL

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). MySQL is a central component of the LAMP open-source web application ...
PHP

PHP

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (or simply PHP) is a server-side scripting language designed for Web development, but also used as a ...
WordPress

WordPress

WordPress powers 31% of the Internet. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and ...

Open Source Resources

This is a showcase of the many websites and platforms where you can find openly licensed icons, fonts, image, tools and other resources. You can use them for any purpose, also commercial (some works have specific licenses that may require attribution, etc. so be sure to review each license).

Images

 

Additional Media Licensed under Creative Commons Licenses