I’d like to take a moment and make an observation if I may.

In all honesty open source software is one of the best things to come from the internet community and has made leaps and bounds in all directions.  Being able to load up a computer or a website with high quality software with excellent support and not pay a penny has it’s advantages when you’re on a student’s budget, but surely this cost savings must be something that business can take advantage of too.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/schoschie/Image by schoschie

So why is it then that some businesses still tend to use name brand software and pay thousands of dollars a year in licencing fees for servers that could be running Apache?  Again if I may, it seems that there is an inverse correlation between how much money a company will spend on software and how much time they’ll spend waiting for it to work.  Sure open source Linux distro’s have an excellent support group, I’ve never had a question that’s gone unsolved for more than 24 hours, but when the servers go down at 3AM there’s no 1-800 number to call.

Another reason why I’m sure more companies are willing to pay for software is because they want something that is an industry standard. Try to find an open source program to develop Flash applications and you’ll come up with several programs, all fairly vague about what they actually do unless you’ve worked with their proprietary counterparts before, and none of them are actually the full package, they depend on closed source IDE files from other companies.

But this isn’t always the case, open source software that has been around a long time like MySQL/PHP and Apache have essentially become industry standard, however they’re also generally considered old hat in most modern software development firms.  Most modern software applications are still licenced programs and for the most part it will probably stay that way until we develop a more effective way of standardizing open source development without stifling the creativity that has made open source what it is today.

What do you think is the future of open source software?