Why Your Future Depends on Open Source -- Part 3

The first reason you need to begin using open source software is that IT budgets suffer from two simultaneous imperatives: low-growth and increasing demand. One important way to respond to these imperatives is to lower your cost of delivering technology. Open source can be an enormous help in this response.

The second reason for using open source is that the software industry itself is undergoing change and will increasingly resemble the open source model: the software itself being freely downloadable, but with far fewer ancillary services delivered by the vendor for free. Beyond the obvious service cuts -- no free proof-of-concepts, architecture roadmap presentations, and so on -- other, less obvious services will be trimmed as well -- things like informative advertising, vendor-sponsored analyst reports. The effect of these changes is that IT organization will need to take more responsibility for technology decisions and processes -- a hallmark of the open source world.

Now, let's discuss the third reason you need to jump on open source -- and this one extends the impact past the confines of the IT organization: open source can offer competitive advantage to the overall organization -- in other words, open source can help businesses perform better financially.

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