The newly elected President of America has asked the experts: why should we use open source?

Its an interesting question for two reasons, the first is the most obvious: the White House is considering a more commited move to open source products, and sees value in them. The second is interesting because the answer really applies to everyone.

The most commonly thought answer is because its free, but lately we’ve all been seeing that its not. Depending on the implementation and supplier it can lead to increased support/maintainance costs; training costs and more to migrate from one O/S to another. I understand of course open source doesn’t have to mean linux but thats definately where this conversation is headed.

Then their are other questions – does an open code base mean better quality code (given that many people see it, but there is often less strict quality control) ? Does it mean that there will be less vulnerabilities, or more given that they are easier to find in the source…

Sun’s Chairman McNealy had this to say,

It’s intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software….The government ought to mandate open-source products based on open-source reference implementations to improve security, get higher-quality software, lower costs, higher reliability–all the benefits that come with open software.

What are you opinions?

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