Proprietary, Open Source or Free Software for a Company’s Most Important Business

Proprietary, open source or free software for a company’s most important business information systems.

By William A. Haynesworth

There are a few things to consider when choosing a software platform for your company’s information system. By definition Information system is: A combination of hardware, software, infrastructure and trained personnel organized to facilitate planning, control, coordination, and decision making in an organization. With this understood; there are some questions that need to be answered. Will the company create the software and be faced with the decision to make it open-source or proprietary? Will the company decide to use an existing open-source product and build upon it? Will the software be used for its use or sale value? The use value of a program is its economic value as a tool. The sale value of a program is its value as a saleable commodity. The answer to these questions should be your starting point when faced with choosing proprietary or open source software for your company.

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the product’s source materials. Open-source software is software whose source code is published and made available to the public enabling anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. This concept is an excellent way to ensure the spread of a particular technology and leveraging the cost of developing software. With open-source software, you have a product that has been tested and troubleshot by many developers. The upside to this is the time it takes to debug the software decreases dramatically, and you have a product that is in a constant state of improvement. Open-source developers do not experience the pressures that routinely compromise conventional closed projects. There is no requirement to reinvent the wheel. Having to “reinvent the wheel” can be very expensive, being able to cut cost on the...