Advocacy The Open Source Case for Customers Beyond all the reliability and quality gains we've discussed elsewhere, the open-source model has one overwhelming advantage for the software customer: you aren't a prisoner. Because you can get access to source, you can survive the collapse of your vendor. You're no longer totally at the mercy of unfixed bugs. You're not shackled to every strategic decision your vendor makes. And if your vendor's support fees become exorbitant, you can buy support from elsewhere. For this reason alone, every software customer should absolutely demand open source and refuse to deal with software vendors who close and shroud their code. It's a matter of controlling your own destiny. (And yes, we'll say the M-word ... don't you want to be out from under Microsoft's thumb?) You Are Your Developers' Customer! This customer case for open source may apply even if the software you're concerned about was developed internally and never for sale on the open market. We hear of one case, for example, in which a few employees at a large Internet-equipment manufacture developed a distributed printing spooler that is very important for company use, but completely unrelated to the company's normal expertise or line of business. Now ... what happens when those employees leave? Under the closed model, this large company would be stuck ... with decaying software or an expensive retraining job. But now imagine that the company released the spooler as open source and helped it find an interest community on the Internet. Now, when the developers leave, someone else might step in at no monetary cost to take over the software. At the very least, there's a known pool of people with an interest from which the company might hire replacements. Open source empowers the customer, even when the producer and customer are part of the same firm. Freedom from Legal Entanglements Using most commercial software involves software licenses, and tracking software copies and usage. This demands record keeping, and legal exposure. Both raise costs. Thus, juggling software licenses and copies is a source of costs to businesses, and legal risk to businesses and individuals. In many (most? all?) businesses, such tracking is imperfect, sometimes intentionally, usually not. Any such imperfection exposes the guilty party to legal actions (fines, litigation, arrest) due to breaking laws and violating copyrights; an intellectual property quagmire. Most/all open source software can be freely copied and used. There are no licenses to track and thus no related costs, or legal risks. Standard Objections There are a couple of standard customer objections to the open-source model that deserve to be exploded. We cover these on the Frequently Asked Questions list. You probably also want to look at the business case for open source for discussion of the reliability gains from this model.

Open Source for You The Case for Business: The open-source model has a lot to offer the business world. It's a way to build open standards as actual software, rather than paper documents. It's a way that many companies and individuals can collaborate on a product that none of them could achieve alone. It's the rapid bug-fixes and the changes that the user asks for, done to the user's own schedule. The Case for Hackers: Internet and Unix hackers, as a rule, already understand the technical case for open source quite well. It's a central part of our engineering tradition, part of our working method almost by instinct. It's how we made the Internet work. opensource.org home page