Advantages of Open Source

There seems to be a bit of pretentiousness at my writing articles about this whole Open Source movement, as I am no more but an end-user of these applications. As a matter of fact, I have only been using Linux and OpenOffice for the past couple of months. What I do have as a way to establish my credibility to write about these topics is that I am precisely that – an end-user. I am one of those people who are dependent on the application to become productive. The one to actually feel what it's like to use the program and put it to good use. The user who does not know the technical aspects of a program, but can definitely feel whether a program is good, functional or complicated.

So what is it about Open Source that has led me to this agenda of writing articles and creating a web site for it? To begin with, its objective and mission is progressive. It is not confined to commercialism and intellectual property rights. Just to get things in perspective, one of the rules or guidelines outlined in their GPL license¹, which defines whether an application is to be considered Open Source or not, is that the source code, the code with which the program is written, should be included in the application's distribution or at least made available to the public. This way, the user who is knowledgeable about programming can improve the software, should that person find any room for improvement or corrections.

How does this make Open Source applications better than propriety and commercial software? First of all, freely distributing the source code and making it open for manipulation allows for more people to find solutions or improvements for the application. People who would be making the contributions, those who would be developing and further improving the software would not be limited to the number of employees of any given corporation. As the source code is freely available to anyone who wishes to improve it (some of course have their own, specific guidelines as to how the creator wants the source code to be manipulated and distributed), there is a greater chance for ideas to converge and be implemented in the development.

Second, while the “volunteerism” innate in the structure may also be seen as a liability, precisely because of the lack of control or the accountability a corporation may impose on its employee during errors or problems, it cannot be discounted that people who actually volunteer to improve a software are engaging in an activity that is internally motivated. Taken together with the first point made above, regarding the quantity of people who can improve the application, the odds for improvement are increased exponentially. That is, while there may be an occurrence of “insincere” participation by half-hearted volunteers in any given Open Source project, where the performance or contribution of which can hamper the development due to the lack of organizational sanctions or control over their output, the number of people who would be able to contribute and improve the project overrides the statistical significance of the uncontrollable occurrence of “insincere” volunteers. Therefore, even though a project development team cannot impose sanctions or control on low output volunteers, its significance is not felt due to virtually unlimited number of volunteers who would actually improve a particular project.

End-user participation is another reason why Open Source projects are actually better than commercial or propriety ones. With Open Source projects, even end-users who do not have the necessary programming skills needed to improve the source code of the application can still play an active role in the development and improvement of the software. This is done by participating in discussion groups and forums, feature requests, and bug tracking and reporting. While it could be argued that the same is true for commercial software, that is users can still make suggestions, end-user participation in Open Source is distinguished from end-user participation in commercial software by giving the end-user the authority to manipulate the actual source code of the program. Unlike commercial softwares, Open Source applications, as mentioned above, distribute their source code and are generally open for improvement by others. This gives end-users the chance to manipulate the source code in such a way that the person's feature request can actually be made by the person himself (again, this is a generalization that might not apply to the entirety of Open Source applications). Take the case of Linux distributions for example. An end-user who thinks there should be a Linux operating system specifically designed to meet the needs of multimedia artists, for example, can collaborate with a team of programmers to create a Linux distribution that would be equipped and designed to meet the productivity needs of this field of expertise. Imagine how long a wait it would be to request Micro$oft to make that edition for multimedia artists.

These are just some of the advantages of using Open Source, one note however about Open Source, is that there are no customer service hotline number to call in case a user might need assistance. What they do have are forums, discussion groups and user documentation which act as support. They cover pretty much everything an end-user might have in mind. The only difference is that the information would not be spoon fed to you. For the most part, you would have to do a lot of reading to get a configuration right or fix a problem. Then again, this also has an advantage – you also actually learn more from researching about a particular issue you might have, rather than waiting for the fix to be spoon fed.

Perhaps Open Source really is the way to go, not only within the field of programming. Perhaps Open Sourcing other products would also be a sign of progressive thinking. I guess for that, we would have to wait for the downfall of Commercialism and the so called Economy.

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