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I’ve been leading technical projects and teams for getting on for 20 years, but my current role is the first where open source has been a point of principle. I’ve used open source software many times, but I’ve reached a point where it’s become important to explicitly support and advocate its use. Why?

The first, and most obvious, reason is the breadth of great software that’s now available for free. I can point to Firefox or Ubuntu, a web browser and a desktop server operating system, but there is so much more out there. Whether you need a mail server, word processor, a database, or even an e-commerce engine, the chances are there is something open source that will do the job.
But is it any good? If it’s free to download and use, surely it’s not good enough to pay for. I’d have to say, for the popular applications exactly the opposite is true. The open source version of a thing can be better than the commercial equivalent. Why is that? A big part of it is that anyone can look at the code. This leads to 2 benefits regarding quality: developers want the code anyone can see to be as good as it can possibly be. It’s like the programming Olympics, where all your peers get to see how good you are. Further, that open scrutiny leads to quick identification of problems, collaborative fixing and the application of more great minds to the really tricky problems. So code that’s freely available and shared often ends up better than the equivalent built in private by a smaller commercial team. Whose going to have the best security, for example? The open source project where everyone can see how it works, point out bugs, and make it better, or the privately developed version?

I used to expect commercial software to be better supported than it’s open source rival, but nowadays the opposite is often the case. I’ve had huge, serious support issues with expensive software from IBM and Microsoft, and I’ve had days of waiting for “the Lab” to come back with a fix. If we can’t solve an open source problem ourselves (remember, we have the code, so we often can) there are huge communities which include the people who write the code, helping each other 24 hours per day, for free. Someone will normally have seen the problem before, so Google becomes our brilliant first line technical support resource. And of course great companies like Varien, Red Hat, Canonical and even Zimbra are making money by selling consulting and support for companies that need someone accountable.

Often the hardware requirements are lower too. Compare Zimbra with Exchange / Outlook, or Apache with IIS, or Ubuntu with Vista to see what I mean.

Often, also, open source is more innovative than the private equivalent, because the proliferation of ideas and initiatives in a big open community is always impressive. How much of Vista, OS X or Windows 7 started out in Gnome, Beryl or Compiz? Where did tabbed web browsing start, or MP3? Obviously commercial companies do innovate, but the open source world gave birth to so many great ideas.

So it’s free, it’s good quality, there’s lots of it, and it’s well supported. How about the secondary benefits? The developers love it, on the whole! They’ve often been playing with it since they were at school, because it’s free, and doesn’t need a stupidly powerful computer to run on. So there are plenty of people with great open source CVs. They love it when they find and submit a bug fix to an open source program, and it’s an even bigger buzz if their code gets added to the next version. Developers collaborate, and giving something to the community that you sweated to create is very rewarding.

Developer productivity is also high, especially when lots of developers are collaborating on one project. The team that built Firefox numbered in the hundreds, all over the World. Tools like trac, bugzilla, wikis and subversion make complex large scale projects much easier, so much so that plenty of commercial software companies have adopted them too.

All in all, I don’t feel the least bit nervous when I go into big companies and recommend an open source solution today. My company competes with commercial licensed software vendors all the time, and the open source story is one that’s very easy to tell today. The clincher is often value for money, because the Microsoft competitor will always be charging you a big license fee, whether you see it or not, but even if they were the same price, the open source option would often be the best choice.

Originally posted here.