The Benefits of Open Source
October 23, 2012
The Harvard Business Review recently reported on the value of open source technology in the article “Open Sourcing May Be Worth the Risk.”
According to the article, the author’s company made a decision in early 2012 to open source one of their products after hearing about the recent success of other companies that had made similar moves.
The intention for going open source was to improve the overall quality of their product:
“Successful open-source projects get rigorously reviewed and improved by thousands of community members. We have about 25 software developers and quality assurance professionals at Mobify, but we’re no match for the all the software developers in the world who might make use of our platform. Each of them is a potential tester of or contributor to the project.
These potential contributors aren’t all in Silicon Valley. Open sourcing your work can be an effective way to reach huge global markets, like India, Brazil, and China. I’ve worked with programmers in these markets, and we wanted to help them develop local solutions to local problems. Developers in other parts of the world may not have a culture of paying for software or simply can’t afford it. We also saw an opportunity to recruit developers in these countries to help with the translation of the code base and related documents.”
While open sourcing a product can be intimidating, it can also quickly and efficiently work out bugs that could not be done internally. Not only is open sourcing a great idea for the company but it also brings better solutions into the market.
Jasmine Ashton, October 23, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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