Individual Donations:
We have briefly alluded in other sections of this web site to the generally better quality, security, support, responsiveness, developer dedication and creativity of open source software. We have mentioned that the open source model gives us access to what we have bought -- the code produced by developers paid for by our investment. There is also the advantage of the highly attractive price! However, there are several other important advantages to the open source development model.
Open source products are generally less vulnerable to the whims of a particular vendor, vendor executive or vendor board. Since we and many, many others from all over the globe have access to the source code, we are largely shielded from changes in direction. Should a proprietary vendor decide that our problem is not important or that their development resources are better allocated to a more profitable division of their business or decide to abandon an entire line of business that happens to be critical to us, there is very little we can do but endure either the vendor's decision or the very expensive proposition of changing vendors. Should an open source project maintainer make the same decisions or even go completely out of business, there is an entire community of support to keep the product alive and in active development. One is no longer held hostage by the software vendor in the open source model. The software is the enabler of our business and not the other way around.
The open source development model helps us to finally reconcile the tension between self-development and off-the-shelf software. Self-development provides the tight customization of products to our environment; it gives us exactly what we need. Off-the-shelf software does not give us the same flexibility but is frequently the only realistically affordable option. Self development can be frightfully expensive.
In solving this dilemma, the open source model not only puts forth a different business model but a different social model -- a reversion to the type of cooperation that shares burdens and ensures survival among small, rural communities. By pooling together the potentially vast numbers of users from anywhere in the world with a common software need, the workload is divided and the financial burden shared. Most of the code can be developed in common yet we can make our own customizations where needed since we have complete access to the source code.
The development community recognized the benefit of this community of cooperation long ago. The challenge now is to make the software consumers who are the benefactors and funders of the software aware of the advantage of working as community rather than in isolation.
There are far more benefits to describe but we will conclude with only one more. Viewing software as the enabler rather than the focus of our processes can help us to drive down the costs of our true revenue generators. These are well illustrated in the case studies found on this web site. In briefest summary, the use of communally developed software helps us distinguish ourselves and compete based upon our core competencies rather than the software we buy. The use of high quality, low cost software reduces the barrier to the delivery of our true product be it hardware that is no longer shackled with a high operating system cost, a managed service no longer inflated by the cost of providing a software vendor's unheard of profits or the provider of an internal support service which has dramatically reduced its overhead through the judicious use of communally developed software.
The open source development model makes business sense. Thus, it adds value. The Open Source Development Corporation provides a way for software consumers to recognize that value and contribute according to that value toward the creation, development and support of this superior software.