The Importance of Open Source Software

I have found articles that go beyond simply explaining the elements of Open Source Software, and go one step further by discussing it's importance.

David A. Wheelers's article "Why Open Source Software?" provides in-depth quantitative data and arguments as to why Open Source Software is the superior choice to proprietary software. The paper provides a balanced argument by examining market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security and total cost of ownership.

Arguments made by Wheeler include the following:

• The most popular web servers have always been Open Source Software (OSS)
• Based on a software program's capacity to resist crashing and freeze-ups, OSS has been found to be more reliable and less vulnerable to problems.
• OSS has been found to be less likely to contain defects than proprietary software.
• In one comparison in performance, Linux was found to be faster than and outperform Microsoft. Samba is capable of handling four times the amount of clients as Microsoft. Linus has superior drive configurations to Microsoft.
• 60% of the world's fastest supercomputers use Linux.
• OSS's are cheaper to acquire, have lower maintenance costs, do not impose license managements costs, have smaller hardware costs, etc.

Ultimately, Wheeler makes a convincing argument for the superior nature of Open Source Software. He does this by drawing conclusions based on numerous data studies, creating a essay with its foundations lying in fact.