Nowadays, everybody is talking
about open source software. So, whether open source is good for us or not.
Let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of open source.
Advantages:
1. Accessible to a wide range of
collaborative development
2. Quickly understand the
internal system operation mechanism in order to further development
3. Save money
4. Easy for novices to learn
5. The system is running
efficiently
Disadvantages:
1. Lack of concern on the user
experience
2. Lack of innovation (basically is
imitation)
3. Lack of product planning
management resulting in too many versions and disarray
4. High cost of development and
maintenance
As a technical staff, learning open source can greatly improve technological level. Now the latest technologies and theories will realize open source. Through the open source learning, it can be the fastest speed to understand lot of basic things. For software companies, open source would reduce development costs, such as free Eclipse, Tomcat, MySQL and so on. Currently, open source has become a marketing and sales model. For example, Flex takes advantages of open source to capture the RIA market. Eclipse eventually replaced JBuilder's position. Even Microsoft will open source part of .Net in order to capture the market as much as possible. Open source is not necessarily free. Currently is free for commercial usage, but there is no guarantee that it does not change the protocol in the future and requires fees.
Sensuously, open source is really
getting close to commercial software, like functionality, price and service
models. It seems more and more unimportant for open source or not.
Reference:
"open source." Webopedia. 13 Oct. 2013 <http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/O/open_source.html>.
Hi Wenlong,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your post. It poses the direct advantages and disadvantages of using open source. I agree that they are closely tied to commercial software. I feel like the best part about it is that it is FREE which you touched on. Especially for college students with limited budgets, open source software becomes a god send. I especially liked the quote in the beginning.
As far as criticism goes, I feel like you could slightly improve your grammar and punctuation.
Overall, this is a solid post and I look forward to reading more of your blog!
Good read Wenlong. I agree there is the major disadvantage of the lack of concern for user experience. When using free open source software there is not much incentive for the developer to fix minor bugs...especially if they are difficult to fix. There is a lack of business responsibility to please its customers in the world of freeware. Loyalty plays a big part in the world of open source. If it wasn't for the Unix emulators (Linux) such as RedHat or the Oracle Virtual Box most of us would not get a chance to learn the Unix operating system and it might have died out so to speak.
ReplyDeleteNice work, I enjoy reading your blog.
ReplyDeleteThe advantages and disadvantages are very clear to understand. And I totally agree with the first disadvantages-lack of user concern. Some open resource software have bugs, and for a user with no knowledge of computer science like me, it is suffering to use. I came across lots of problems to practice. This is a really good point, I should have written it into my blog.
Can’t wait to read your next blog.