Institutional adoption of Open Source Software pros and cons Research Paper

Institutional adoption of Open Source Software pros and cons - Research Paper Example When OSS got momentum, the buzzwords start flying quick and loose. But the very boom of open source software forces the different institutes to take into consideration the OSS depending upon its advantages. The availability of free open source softwares (OSS) is a sort of great help at individual and at institutional or organizational level. The OSS is gaining popularity in both commercial and government domains. An interesting issue in the soft technology is the issue of choice between the proprietary and OSS. Institutes or different organizations are seeing the OSS as an alternative of the proprietary software. The open source applications like Apache, Perl and Sendmail are the focus of different organizations or institutions for their internet based applications or systems. As quoted about open source software: The vision for many developing countries is that by using affordable yet effective open source software to bridge the digital divide, they can achieve rapid and sustainable economic and social development. (Joshua L Mindel, Lik Mui, Sameer Verma, 2007) Most of the institutions or organizations adopt open source software due to certain advantages which open source applications are providing. The advantages which are taken into consideration are low cost of license, more stable features, high security, user friendliness, support cost and facility to upgrade the existing tool according to the new requirements due to the availability of source code. So in the presence of all these advantages we can conclude that open source software is free to use, copy, distribute and modify. In the adoption of an OSS institutes also pay severe attention to economic growth that what is the Return On Investment (ROI). The ROI must be taken into account as an advantage of OSS. But there are certain disadvantages which must also be taken into account by an institute