- Economic benefits from open source are both direct and indirect. The direct benefits begin with the fact that, generally, open source software is distributed without a software license fee and is extended to the entire hardware and software stack and related services when compared with proprietary systems. In place of the license fee, customers are offered an optional subscription for services or support fee per server. While self-support isn’t an option for most customers, entertaining competing bids for support is a very attractive proposition. This can result in lower costs for support throughout the life cycle of the open source component or application. There are also indirect economic benefits that ultimately accrue to everyone who adopts open source from the more efficient use of resources across the industry, with less redundancy and fewer opportunities for any one vendor to monopolize a product category. This helps to minimize vendor costs and, therefore, keep customer expenses down.
- open source software doesn’t necessarily do a better job of delivering business value than commercial software. It isn’t necessarily easier to develop new applications with open source software, and it doesn’t necessarily produce better applications than commercial software. But a majority of respondents did indicate that open source was playing a role in helping to lower their companies’ overall operating costs, a business benefit that can’t be underestimated. A majority of respondents indicated that open source software played an important role in improving the quality of their companies’ products and business processes . This goes along with the perception of the high quality of open source software itself and the flexibility open source provides that can allow changes and modifications to be made more quickly and with less effort. This is a clear benefit, although one that is difficult to quantify in hard dollars. On the other hand, a majority of respondents did not see open source playing an important role in directly affecting their companies’ abilities to acquire and retain new customers or to manage ongoing customer relationships. This points to the fact that in practice, open source software is technology, and the impact on customers will come from what a firm does with that technology, not the technology itself. The other attributes of open source, such as community, choice, and flexibility, are harder to translate into customer relationship benefits.
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tharaka
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