advantages and disadvantages of general purpose application software

Not only are open source solutions typically much more inexpensive in an enterprise environment for equivalent or superior capability, but they also give enterprises the ability to start small and scale (more on that coming up). Open source is generally much more cost-effective than a proprietary solution. This allows you to get the best of both worlds - flexibility, agility, and the ability to get started quickly and inexpensively, with the ability to mature to a large scale, fully supported, enterprise-grade implementation, and you don’t have to go over proprietary licensing hurdles to get there. Once you make that determination, professional support and services are increasingly available for open source products, especially those supported by Red Hat. A great advantage of open source is the ability to take the community versions, get started, understand whether they can solve your business problem, and begin to deliver value right away. Your enterprise will soon be competing on speed, if it isn’t already.

Or, at a minimum, I’d at least have to go through an extensive process to sign off on some sort of pilot project with their sales organization. If I were to attempt to do that with similar proprietary products from VMware or Microsoft or Oracle, I would spend days or weeks simply negotiating terms and conditions and fees just to get started. I could start building a project, or a platform, or testing feasibility or developing my skills. Instead of waiting for the vendor to deliver that capability, you can create it yourself.Īs another example, today I could stand up an OpenStack instance, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux instance or the community equivalent thereof, or a MongoDB instance, and I could do it on my own with the open source software available freely over the Internet. Open source helps keep your IT organization from getting blocked because a particular capability isn’t available from a vendor.

Open source enables technology agility, typically offering multiple ways to solve problems. If you can’t compete on agility, you’re going to get left behind by the competition. IT leaders must fundamentally provide flexibility and agility for their enterprise. Here are some fundamental advantages I believe open source offers over proprietary solutions: 1. It’s through these first-hand experiences that I’ve reflected on the reasons why open source is a good fit for the enterprise. Beyond that, we always seek out open source solutions first for our other business needs, such as user authorization and telephony. Naturally, we turn to our own open source solutions for our operating system, middleware, and cloud needs. We’ve been quite successful in finding open source solutions for many of our business needs. I work with IT teams that are so passionate about Red Hat’s open source mission that they bring a 'default to open source' mentality to every project we work on.

Advantages and disadvantages of general purpose application software