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12.02.08 Open Source Software Myths  By
Praval Singh
It does not require immense general knowledge to know that all those things that have been successful irrespective of their fields have had lots of myths attached to them. FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) being one of them and it is the responsibility of people like you and me to make others know that these logics are just plain and jane myths and nothing more than that. I feel honored to enlist few of the top myths we have in the society regarding FOSS: • FOSS is 2nd Best: Presently the myth is not at all true as applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org are equally competent than their proprietary software counterparts. But there are areas like OCR Scanning where functionality and usability still has a larger scope to move to perfection. • FOSS is just for developers: Contrary to common belief, FOSS is not just for its developers, users and their founders. But in recent times there has been a plethora of opportunities for technical writers and other category of users to develop their expertise in the highly rewarding FOSS community. • FOSS is devoid of support: The enhanced feature of codes being available to everyone actually increases the chance of getting software support. For example,Red Hat earns huge profits by offering support solutions to enterprises. • FOSS is monotonous: Initial attempts of FOSS trying to copy and offer monotonous software has been completely replaced these days. FOSS now has revolutionized its business operations in entirety by being able to market its services domain in equality with the software domain.
• FOSS is not free at all: By contrast, there is just a FOSS license which has to be purchased and the result is an individual's decision to use FOSS as and when he likes. Two types of licenses which can be used are BSD style licenses which are very permissive in nature and Copyleft licenses which are very restrictive in nature. • FOSS requires money: FOSS is absolutely free and open source supporters' infact have a long term relation as the availability of code and generation of ideas by interacting with the community serves as a major advantage to them. • FOSS has lesser security: People perceive that things which are hidden are safe. But, in FOSS, the focus is more on the protection of information than the methodology used to implement it. Several codes are made and rectified in the public and it thus increases the knowledge of all the users worldwide. • FOSS works just for small projects: The truth is that FOSS has projects ranging from medium to large scale and a few examples of it are GIMP, Xfce desktops, Ubuntu, etc. • FOSS is only for software: After initial hiccups, FOSS has started manufacturing 3-D games, though it continues to be 2nd best because of the unavailability of free 3-D video drivers. Nowadays, several online games support Linux/GNU clients as well. • FOSS costs nothing and does no good: The availability and shipping of FOSS actually costs nothing and is thus perceived to be not of superior quality. But, it being an exception has falsified the fact and thus presented a new business logic which says that "Free can be good too". Comments About the Author: Praval Singh is a contributing writer for Brajeshwar.com. |
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