Wednesday 10 August 2011

Comparison with Closed Source

The debate over open source vs. closed source (alternatively called proprietary software) is sometimes heated. One source of conflict is related to economics making money through traditional methods, such as sale of the use of individual copies and patent royalty payment (generally called licensing), is more difficult and in many ways against the very concept of open source software.

Some closed-source advocates see open source software as damaging to the market of commercial software. This is one of the many reasons, as mentioned above, that the term free software was replaced with open source because many company executives could not believe in a product that did not participate economically in a free-market or mixed-market economy.

The counter to this argument is the use of open source software to fuel the market for a separate product or service. For example:-

1. Providing support and installation services; similar to IT Security groups, Linux Distributions, and Systems companies.

2. Using the software as a stepping stone to sell a higher-end product or service, e.g. OpenOffice.org vs. StarOffice.

3. Cost avoidance / cost sharing many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share development costs (X Window System and the Apache web server).

Since open source software is open, defects and security flaws are more easily found. Closed-source advocates argue that this makes it easier for a malicious person to discover security flaws. Further, that there is no incentive for an open-source product to be patched. Open-source advocates argue that this makes it easier also for a patch to be found and that the closed-source argument is security through obscurity, which this form of security will eventually fail, often without anyone knowing of the failure.

Further, that just because there is not an immediate financial incentive to patch a product, does not mean there is not any incentive to patch a product. Further, if the patch is that significant to the user, having the source code, the user can technically patch the problem themselves. These arguments are hard to prove. However, research indicates that the open-source software Linux has a lower percentage of bugs than some commercial software.

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