by Mohamed Al-Refai

Created on: November 18, 2009

Open source is a philosophy that brought a great balance to software industry. To understand why it is important we should remember what computing is doing for us.

Computing is not like any other industry that has been introduced to mankind; it spreads to every aspect and became why we can do and why we can't. Having a new feature in any institute would change the whole process they run.

But software products have became more and more expensive, people who live in poor countries aspiring to catch up with the latest technologies can't afford the expensive licensing of those products, that made some of them to settle with minimal features and leash the power of computing to what they can afford. Others went to pirating and claimed that they had the right to use the same technologies like any other nation for without it they can't meet the needs of their era.

Farther more the code written inside those software products is a mystery and any confidential information stored in a machine that runs this mystery might be compromised if it contains a back-door (a way to bypass security and gain an unauthorized access). This is a scary thought whether the user is a billion dollar company or a ten yours old kid.

This is where Open Source Software (OSS) comes; some people believe that software is a thought and so it should never be exchanged with money because it costs practically nothing. (OSS) is free which helps the poor to meet their needs. The money an (OSS) developer gain comes from donations which are coming from the goodness of the heart and the feeling of gratitude.

Software developers are invited to contribute their skills in the (OSS) development which makes it a powerful tool to insure the quality of the program since it gets reviewed and developed by verity of minds around the globe. It also avoids holding some of the program's features; which is done by some of software development companies who don't introduce all their product features at a time so they have something for next version to sell.

Open source software is insured to have the integrity because of nothing to hide policy. The user can view the code and therefore figure out how it works and what it dose. It also grants the users a better troubleshooting to any problem, they could even post their problem and developers from all over the world will answer it.

However, software development companies are still selling their expensive packages because some users refuse to use a free product, they want someone to take the responsibility for the software they use, some of them even believe that a dedicated software developer who gets paid for his work would do a better job than someone who writes codes in their part times. Needless to say how software development companies are more motivated to take the next step in development because they want to sell and make money.

At the end I strongly believe that both open source and paid program should exists, together they can complete the world and keep the computing development balanced.

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