Open what?

Open source is a term referred to software whose source code is freely available. That doesn’t mean ‘free’ as in no price attached, but rather the software is ‘freely available’ to the public. Open source software is governed by liberal licensing laws that lets you change and modify it to your needs and is free from restrictive and expensive licences that proprietary software like many Microsoft and Adobe products impose on you.

Why is open source a good thing?

A big benefit is that it lets people like you use software for less (sometimes free) where normally you would be paying high licensing fees or subscription costs. It grants you a licence to use the software for its lifetime and that licence lets you take control of the software (we opt for popular open source software that has a big user base, so it is therefore highly unlikely to disappear).

As a comparison, take our example before of Microsoft – their product Office has a cost attached to it and changes regularly to accomodate new features, security fixes etc. Open Office (the open source equivalent of MS Office) has thousands of people developing it worldwide out of their own free time, meaning it is constantly being updated and improved upon. It’s also not uncommon for open source software to be updated fast than proprietary software because of the large teams involved in maintaining the software.

Other benefits include:

• Bigger choice of developers to choose from meaning you are free to get help elsewhere with the systems we develop (we want you to stay with us, but we won’t force you to!).
• There is no single entity that the future of the software depends upon as it’s a collaborative effort to maintain. The systems we build are likely to be supported for many years to come.
• Systems are not built entirely from scratch. You save in the long-run as many of the features that would normally have to be built come with the system and only needs customising.