In today’s world with rapid advances and expanding demand for fast, efficient and reliable technology for business efficiency and growth, organizations, including start-ups, medium-sized and large organizations are making good use of open source software to increase productivity. The benefits of open source software are enormous. Access to innovation, numerous customization options, flexibility, speed to market, and cost effectiveness are some of the numerous benefits of adopting open source software. Furthermore, an interesting factor of open source software is the community surrounding most open source software packages. Organizations adopting open source software’s hardly get stuck when they need help with fixing certain issues.
With Open source users have access to the source code and have the option to use in their own way. Hence, branding and unlimited customization options can be achieved using open source tools. Furthermore, enterprises can readily get community help from wide range of developers. Open source code gets better over time since users readily give recommendations for improvement and community members of developers are widely available to improve the code, release newer and better versions.
Launching a new product or service can be very challenging for both small and big organizations. Over the years, open source software’s have proven to speed up software development life cycle, making it easier and faster between the cycles with enhanced innovation and quality. It is no surprise that the mobile device market keeps releasing better and improved versions of their operating systems every six months. The wide varieties of modules, plugins, code snippets easily enable enterprises to solve specific problems quickly.
Launching a new software product can be very expensive (and also time consuming) especially if you are building it from scratch. The lack of licensing and maintenance fees offers a solution that reduces cost. In fact, a lot of businesses are making a switch from proprietary software packages to open source software solutions due to the financial benefits offered by OSS. Other financial burdens that are associated with proprietary software’s such as upgrade costs, administration fees, multi-user fees are not associated with open source software’s.
Hence, open source software’s allow enterprises to allocate more financial resources to other important aspects of their products such as product testing and marketing. In fact, a good number of open source software companies now offer free support, free updates and training which would otherwise be charged for when using proprietary software’s.
Charter Global is known for its expertise in building software and providing services using open source technology. We have successfully developed and delivered hundreds of projects to our clients. Among the many services we render at Charter Global, we develop applications and tools using open source.