Open source is cheaper than proprietary software, right? In the Data Center Decisions 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey, lower cost was the top reason cited for converting from proprietary to open source software. And lower cost appears to be a primary incentive for Linux adoption that has fueled the rapid growth of open source in general and of Linux in particular.

I feel that is important for me to further analyze the benefits of open source software. In a previous post, I highlighted the cost-savings of open source and did not mention any of the other advantages that it provides. This post should provide a more balanced view of open source and the intrinsic benefits that free software provides.

In the ongoing debate between open source purists and people who appreciate and defend proprietary software, extremists will always have their voices, but many people in the open source community are waking up to the fact that proprietary platforms and applications can co-exist peacefully with open source ones.

With the current economic recession, open source software is a route that some enterprise developers are increasingly considering as a lower-cost alterative to proprietary solutions. However, one of the potential issues with open source software adoption is license compliance—ensuring that developers and enterprises are not in violation with a particular license.

For most of my formative years, I was primarily interested in building stuff as a personal hobby. Back then, when I first learned about Open Source, I was skeptical for one primary reason: financial (I need money ergo I need a job/gig). This reason is no longer a concern due to the brave souls that made open source software lucrative for businesses to build on.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are helping the U.S. military analyze and develop the advantages of open-source software -- programs that make their source code open to others so it can be changed and improved. Bringing many minds to bear on a given program can lead to software that is both high quality and low cost, or even free.

Because it lacks the expensive licensing that is often the hallmark of proprietary software, open source is regularly touted as a way for IT departments to make their budget stretch a little bit further and it has already enjoyed considerable success in certain areas of the enterprise, such as web servers.

Open-Xchange Inc., today announced full-featured collaboration software designed to make it easy for small- and medium-sized businesses to take advantage of the cost benefits of open source without requiring prior Linux know-how. The product, Open-Xchange Express Edition, provides organizations with an alternative to expensive proprietary collaboration software.

"The news over the past few years in open source establish it as the natural way to release software. If there’s anything else you can do to earn money–whether setting up a social environment like Second Life, putting up ads like Google, or selling hardware like Intel–you really need to search hard for a reason to keep software proprietary."