Recession Worries and Open Source

“The Great October Crash 08” is one of the most important events for all economists and financiers across the globe to study and understand the implications on various other sectors of businesses. There are tough times ahead for all businesses and the rock bottom world economy isn’t also helping the cause.

For companies and managers, this might be the toughest time of their careers as they know what to do but unable to understand how to do. It is not practical for companies to reduce budgets as they cannot cut on the promotions, payments of the work force, or for that matter, anything which is important to the company. The most logical thing to do here is to without new servers and new software for a while. Open Source vendors are indeed the saviors at this time as they can keep the companies performing on the IT front without much consideration.

There have been a lot of innovations of the open source products and services during the last few years. It is very refreshing to see that Open source products can very well be compared to other closed source counterparts on different parameters such as reliability, usage, rich content etc. and the differences between the two is almost nil. Some avid supporters would also believe that the Open source products are better than their counterparts.

The justifications of why companies and clients all over the world adopt Open Source products are because of two primary cognitive reasons which are cited as follows:

• Increased Return on Investment (ROI).
• Decrease in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

No licensing costs, free availability of commercial packages, ease in distributions, increased vendor support, additional business applications etc. are other advantages of adopting Open Source Products. It is of worth mentioning here that these products cost less and are able to be counted on all the other parameters that are important for cost cutting measures in the company, hence reducing global recession worries in the organization.

Some of the products here are worth mentioning as they have received global acceptance and recognition. These are Open Office 3 Word Processor which is a perfect substitute for Microsoft Office suite. Other products worth mentioning are Virtual Box as a virtual machine, WebGUI as a content management system, Ubuntu as a desktop replacement system, SugarCRM as a CRM system, etc. The concerns here can be genuine as people might say that they have not heard of these companies, but it is again worth mentioning that these Open Source products are from IT powerhouses such as Sun Microsystems, Plain Black, Canonical and SugarCRM.

To reduce recession worries, Brent Toderash mentions seven financial reasons why Linux should be used in an organization. These reasons are as follows:

• Avoid Vendor Lock in.
• Redirect funds into salaries.
• Lower licensing costs.
• Opens an array of available applications.
• Provide Source code access.
• Facilitates rapid corporate growth.
• Pays for value.

What are your views ?