Open Source Wave
Freedom is something we all aim for. Human Philosophy urges us to aim to greater independence and distance itself from any kind of rules and boundaries
Even market forces have proved to world time and again that self managed markets are always poised for greater growth and new highs. Same is true for any business. We have seen Indian markets flourishing to new heights after Government of India gave freehand in 1992. Since nationalized banks have lost monopoly in markets or PSU have given space to private telecom operators customers have experienced new kind of market revolution working to their favor in India. Today we have lowest call rates for mobile in India.
We can extend same concept to IT industry, where defined interfacing standards among hardware vendors has lead to greater drive for introducing innovative products in marketplace. Same drive we can see coming our way in Software Industry through Open Source Community.
I just referred to “Open Source Community” drive which is motion since last 30 years with development of Unix. This has become more prominent since inception of internet with communities working towards creating useful tools and technologies.
From Small and Mid Sized companies’ perspective, it provides them with better cost saving options and large enterprises use them to free themselves from lock in of big IT vendors and develop better control over enterprise class applications.
Until recently Open Source Software are invariably associated with term “Free”. However it simply means that source code is available and users are free to modify software to suit their needs. Soon companies and institutions started associating business with this model. It is definitely money generating business model which is posing threat to established commercial platforms in application servers, portal server or content management solution space. However with the intensity of investments planned by IT service consumers it hints at another “commoditized” IT service capability in the pipeline. Another exciting side of the story is that the even mainstream IT Service Providers are looking forward to explore the benefits of open source software to control cost in large transformational programs. Open Source Solution stack is always solution option for pre project analysis exercise.
More precisely, Open Source Software provides four essential freedoms*:
· The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
· The freedom to study how the program works, and change it (freedom 1).
· The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
· The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3)..
* As per GNU Public License Policy
Whatever end result may be I am sure this wave is being noticed and world would develop more interest and attention towards this cause in time to come.
