Let’s get one thing clear. Open-source software has a lot of things going for it. if you are looking for something that is not going to burn a hole through your pocket, open-source software is the solution for you. In fact, it’s not going to burn a hole in your pocket at all because it’s absolutely free. You don’t pay a cent for it. Sounds awesome, right? Well, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. That’s just the first thing that you would notice about open-source software. There’s more.
If you’re looking for software that is not going to leave you vulnerable to spyware, hacking attacks or all sorts of security headaches, open-source software, surprisingly enough, is a good option. Why? Unlike Microsoft products that have a fixed core of people ready, willing and able to patch up whatever security or structural defects their software may have around the clock, open-source doesn’t have such a staff. That’s right. This is the bad news. There is no massive army of highly trained and highly paid engineers distributed throughout the world ready to sit up and pay attention when somebody sends a vulnerability or security breach complaint.
However, with that said, open-source software also has something better. I know that sounds crazy because what would be better than having an army of trained professionals that are paid a lot of money? A much bigger army of volunteers. For example, WordPress is the world’s blogging standard. It has millions upon millions of installed operations and millions and millions of highly skilled people use it every day.
When there is some sort of vulnerability that somebody detected somewhere, you can bet that all these people would start working on solutions and they would compare notes. This is why open-source software’s distributed security and update system blows away paid formats like Microsoft.
With all that said, please understand that open-source software is not a magic bullet solution because it only works for the common denominator. In other words, if you have a hundred people and 99 of them share the same problem, chances are open-source software would be your best bet if you have the same problem.
If you take that 100 people again and only one of them has a problem, chances are open-source software probably would not work in this situation because open-source needs a lot of people having the same problem for the solutions to bubble up to the top and get distributed throughout the installation network.
This doesn’t mean that a problem is not going to be addressed at all but it probably will take a lot of time. It also would probably involve a big enough community of people that share that problem within the larger ecosystem of that open-source software’s install base. Do you see how this works?
This is a serious drawback and this is why a lot of open-source companies actually make money off a software that is designed to be free.
They make money because a lot of these people who suffer from a very specialized problem do not have all the time in the world to wait for solutions to come up. They would step up and they would put their money where their mouth is. They would ask for custom solutions and then they would pass around that solution within their small community or like in most cases, they would sell it. So, if you are on the market for software that makes a particular problem go away, be mindful of both its benefits and its limitations.