Why use open-source software?
Let’s start with the reason anyone can understand: It’s cheap. But, what’s more important is that the open-source software model’s return on investment is outstanding. While people can argue until they’re blue in the face about exactly how much bottom-line goodness you can get from using open source, the simple facts are that it delivers the goods at an affordable price. Consider, if you will, that of Alexa’s Top 20 Global Web sites, only the handful owned by Microsoft aren’t built on top of open-source software. This hasn’t happened overnight, but by the late 1990s, many corporations began switching to open-source software for their Internet needs. It’s scalability, both on the technical and business—no need to continuously buy new licenses—made it ideal for the Internet. Now, after about a decade of proving itself, open-source software stacks have been moving from edge servers on the Internet and department servers for branch offices to core business applications. For example, open-s
