Open source software is entrepreneurs best friend

July 14th, 2006 by

Kinan Sweidan

osi

Start up cost for IT projects is usually very high.. you spend $$$$ on database server, $$$ on an application server, $$ on operating system… couple thousands here, couple thousands there and you spend all your budget on infrastructure.

Open source software has changed the game forever. If you own a small business or a start up company then you need to use open source products to lower your cost and save your money for the actual implementation of the application.

I build both complex n-tire enterprise applications using J2EE and SOA technologies for big companies and simple websites using Ruby On Rails and Ajax for small businesses. Sometimes I feel that I work in two conflicting worlds… the enterprise domain which only believes in big names and sophisticated solutions and the small business domain which believes in keeping things simple and at low cost.

Software Engineers at smaller companies come up with very interesting solutions for complex problems by using a lot of open source products. They are not afraid of trying open source software with the mentality of “how could you loose money when you don’t spend any money”.

The story is totally different in the enterprise world (except my friends at Google and Yahoo!) where complex solutions are provided for simple problems and open source software is considered more expensive to implement because it comes with no support or guarantee.

The true story is… open source is a serious contender to proprietary software and big companies need to get real and adapt to the new generation.

I personally would rather to spend my money on customizing open source applications to fit my needs instead of buying out of the box proprietary applications which were designed to fit everybody.

Here is a list of some of my favorite open source software (they are organized in a random way)