Best reason to create a Open Source project

The open source movement is huge and it’s getting bigger over time. Sometimes it can be reluctant for some people to post their hard work to the public, but there’s a lot of positiveness that can come of it with the best result.

So, let’s find out why is open source good and taking it seriously by all sizes of organizations?

Visibility

When a project is run using open source, the existence and nature of the project are visible to the outside world and to people in other parts of the company. If the project is visible to a strategically important community - whether it participates in the project or not, but the company is better able to present plans, goals, features, and statements of progress. Open source makes available additional communication channels, including more informal ones consulted by the target developer community.

Costs down

Cost savings may not be only part of open source's allure, but it's still a big part, no matter what size the organization. Enterprises have always customized packaged software such as ERP applications, except now, with open source, that customization is less expensive.

Improves quality

Open source fans have long contended that the methodology produces better software. Their reasoning: If the code is flawed, the developer community can identify and address the problem quickly, where a single coder might plod on unawares, at least for a while.

Delivers business agility

Businesses likewise benefit from open source's ability to let them react quickly. For one thing, companies that use open software code aren't tied to vendors' timelines for commercial application upgrades.

Mitigates business risk

The open-source option may reduce business risk. Vendors come and go, and commercial priorities change, whereas a community's focus is more constant. The openness and transparency of open source mitigate a lot of risks. Whether a company is big or small, will have to stop developing code if it's no longer commercially viable, and you no longer have access to the source code and repositories. If you can actually get a vibrant community built up around your code, it's much more resilient than a strictly commercial enterprise.

Provide training and learning opportunity

The best way to learn design and implementation skills is to read and study good designs and source code. This teaching method is rarely used in software development and engineering curricula, so it's often up to companies to do on-the-job training. Whether the open-source project is internal or external, it can supply source code, design documents or at least archives of design discussions, and provide opportunities to try out ideas and talk to designers and implementers.

Creates a better society

You may serve by a number of open source projects like Apache to host the site, MySQL to store the database, Linux to run the server, and if you’re not using Internet Explorer you’re probably reading this from an open source browser. By making your projects open source you are contributing to a better society where good ideas thrive.

Design disciplines

Doing development open-source style requires making almost all decisions on mailing lists open to the public. Design and implementation proposals are made in writing and discussed by the community, and the resulting decisions are summarized in writing. All this written material is archived and available for everyone. By enforcing this level of discipline, the quality of the design and implementation decisions is likely to increase. In many ways, the open-source process resembles the literate programming methods promoted over the years by computer scientists.

Help the others

By publishing your code on a site you make all of your code available to anyone who has similar ideas for software. People can make the changes on your project and improve upon it for themselves and their fork probably has a lot of valuable code you can implement in your own project.

Ubiquity

By providing an open-source offering, a project can begin to spread that offering first to the outside users and developers of the project, then out to the broader open-source community, and then perhaps to the larger developer community. Both the no-cost and open nature of the offering and the transparent stance of the project to the users of the offering contribute to the spread of the offering. You don't need maintenance work by yourself when you have a community of eager developers to do the dirty work for you. Just by adding numbers to your development team you are cutting back a lot of the workload for your team and you will probably get more thorough testing from your contributors than you could have achieved in a timely manner with your current staff.

Best development

Some projects have as a goal developing a standard - API definitions, language extensions, or tool extensions. Opening up the process to everyone makes it more likely to get the best advice and achieve the greatest adoption. The NetBeans IDE APIs had been designed in an open way, to begin with, so an open-source approach simply maintained this practice. A goal for OpenOffice was to create an XML standard for file formats.

Provide quality software

Open source tends to produce better quality software than its proprietary or alternative counterparts. When you write closed source software, the only developers that can potentially detect, diagnose, triage, and resolve software bugs are those that happen to be employed by the company that publishes the software.

Always up to date with the modern world

Open source software is more than simply "published" code. You'd be hard-pressed to find an open source project that follows outdated. By virtue of being distributed and unbridled by policy or technical debt, open source projects all but necessitate modern software development workflows. These workflows are electronic - means the process is naturally captured and exposed, asynchronous - means decisions are time and location agnostic, and lock-free - means contributors can rapidly experiment without prior approval. These three workflow characteristics more rapid development cycles and more frequent releases without sacrificing quality.

Patch on your own schedule

With open source, not only can leaner, more agile, non-profit-oriented organization move faster, since you have access to the source code, you can often apply fixes, both large and small, at your own convenience, not at the convenience of the publishing organization's release cycle.

Reduce duplication of effort

Open source reduces duplication of efforts, both within an organization and across organizations, by allowing for individual components to be shared. You should focus on your core competency.

More secure

Security is a complicated thing, which is why open development is a key factor and a precondition for creating secure solutions. And security is getting more important every day. When development happens in the open, you can directly verify if a vendor is actively pursuing security and watch how it treats security issues. The ability to study the source and perform independent code audits makes it possible to find and fix security issues early.

Modular

Open source projects tend to be more modularly architected, improving both the flexibility and the robustness of the code. By its nature, it's built for a variety of use cases, environments, and users. This means more options rather than hard-coding defaults for a particular use, and a tendency to encourage more modularity rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all feature, resulting in greater flexibility and lower customization costs in the long run.

It's the future

Open source is how modern organizations and increasingly more traditional organizations build software. Today, all of the largest names in technology, from IBM to SAP, to Adobe actively participate in the open source community. It's slightly inaccurate to say that "open source is the future." Open source has already won. It's becoming exceedingly challenging to make the argument that five-or-ten years from now the technology landscape is going to be less collaborative and more closed.

 

People are reaping cost benefits by using open source, but that's not the No. 1 priority. It's also the avoidance of lock-in, the ability to customize, the ability to have a better feel of what you're paying for. open source is the combination of all that. Finally, open source is the better option for now and also for the future. Thank you!