On Fri, 8 Jan 2010, Parijat Kalia wrote: > 1. He feels that open source is not reliable whereas closed source is. The > logic being that, once the application is developed and sold, if it runs > into some kind of a bug or an error, there is support team for closed source > technologies who are going to come and help you fix it, whereas this is not > a guarantee in open source technologies.
Even with closed source products there's no guarantee that you'll get a stable product with all the bugs fixed. Even with paying customers, companies can choose not to fix bugs because the next version is around the corner. > 2. Development for a successful open source technology is community > dependent, implying the choice is still on a faithful group of users, > whereas in closed source technologies it is more reliable because it is > being backed by a company (microsoft for .NET and SAP for SAP). True, but since you have access to the code, you can fix the software even if noone else will. Also a community around a product is not driven purely by the profit motive, and often this means stuff is designed 'right' rather than as fast as possible. > 3. The third point that was raised is, closed source technologies enforce > quality control as opposed to open source technologies, where the onus on > quality control in case of the latter, is more on the developer himself. I would say the quality is on the community rather than the developer. A hundred eyeballs looking at code is more likely to find bugs than a smaller team. > The reasoning I could offer was that big companies such as Yahoo ( symfony), > facebook (php), and Twitter (rails) rely on open source technologies, surely > they are aware of the above points but still choose to go with open source > rather than closed source technologies. Money is not the most important > criteria for these companies, and there definitely is a better reason why > they choose open rather than closed source technologies. There are many reasons to go with open source, and as you say, it often doesn't involve money. Some companies dont want to locked in or controlled by the development cycle of another company. In many cases the sheer size of the company would make a closed source solution prohibitively expensive. Google has thousands of servers and many data centers, so a Microsft-based solution probably would be very expensive. Google have their own engineering teams, they can support their own infrastructure quite easily. Open source has a long history that predates a lot of closed source technology. --
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