Calgary Web Designer Jenn Armour | Info Architecture + User Centric Web Design + Online Marketing + Social Media + Ideas

Software Source Code: When you purchase a license to use most commercial software, you are dependent on the software designer to add features or customize the software for the needs of your business or organization. The software manufacturer provides you with only the executable program. You do not have access to the source code. With open source software, you are free to modify the software and customize it in order to suit your application.

Scalability and Robustness: a large community of highly skilled software developers has created open source solutions, such as Linux, Perl, and Apache. As you can see from our examples, open source software is used across a full spectrum of web sites.  Open source UNIX based operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD are extremely robust and efficient as they are suitable for both small and large organizations.

Large Support Community: a large community of developers that communicate through on-line discussion groups supports many open source offerings. This allows common problems to be easily solved and bugs to be quickly exposed and fixed.  

Security and Protection of Proprietary Data: There is a myth that open source software is more vulnerable to attack than proprietary solutions. Actually, the opposite is often true. Because the source code is exposed, it is often easier for a security minded software community to close security holes or breeches.