As the biggest user of Open Source Software within the Group, we had to prepare a presentation for our Executives about the Open Source trends (definitions, legal aspects, trends, scope, where are we already using OSS, potentials, etc.). During our online research, we found an interesting and extensive (120 pages as a PDF document!) presentation about this subject from David A. Wheeler. A great aggregation of information!
Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers!
Goal of the paper
The goal of this paper is to convince you to consider using OSS/FS when you’re looking for software, using quantitive measures. Some sites provide a few anecdotes on why you should use OSS/FS, but for many that’s not enough information to justify using OSS/FS. Instead, this paper emphasizes quantitative measures (such as experiments and market studies) to justify why using OSS/FS products is in many circumstances a reasonable or even superior approach. I should note that while I find much to like about OSS/FS, I’m not a rabid advocate; I use both proprietary and OSS/FS products myself. Vendors of proprietary products often work hard to find numbers to support their claims; this page provides a useful antidote of hard figures to aid in comparing proprietary products to OSS/FS.
Organisation of the paper
Below is data discussing market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. I close with a brief discussion of non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and conclusions. A closing appendix gives more background information about OSS/FS. Each section has many subsections or points. The non-quantitative issues section includes discussions about freedom from control by another (especially a single source), protection from licensing litigation, flexibility, social / moral / ethical issues, and innovation. The unnecessary fears section discusses issues such as support, legal rights, copyright infringement, abandonment, license unenforceability, GPL “infection”, economic non-viability, starving programmers (i.e., the rising commercialization of OSS/FS), compatibility with capitalism, elimination of competition, elimination of “intellectual property”, unavailability of software, importance of source code access, an anti-Microsoft campaign, and what’s the catch. And the appendix discusses definitions of OSS/FS, motivations of developers and developing companies, history, licenses, OSS/FS project management approaches, and forking.