Why Open Source?
What is Open Source?
- Free distribution
- Source code
- No license costs, only customizing
- No forced updates
- No deployment limits
- Widely used (production approved, very stable)
- Open minded, community driven
- Everybody can contribute and participate
- Collaborative and social
Why web technology?
- Latest technology
- Continuous improvement (Web 2.0, HTML5)
- Efficient
- Simple interface
- Available on all devices (desktop, mobile, tablet)
- Barrier-free
- Centralized
- High performance, scalable (Wikipedia, Facebook)
- Powerful and robust
- Open Source (Firefox, Apache, PHP, MySQL)
Why web publishing?
- flexible
- consistent
- active content
- dynamic pages
- cross media
- multi channel
- multimedia
Why Simple Groupware & CMS?
- Open Source
- Web technology
- Web publishing
- + Free documentation
- + Free support
Numbers?
- SourceForge.net (2.600.000 users, 240.000 projects
- Github (419.000 users, 1.292.000 repositories)
- more numbers!
Common issues?
- What happens when development of a project stops?
- new community and/or project(s) come up as forks (see MySQL forks)
- commercial development always possible
- What happens when support of a project stops?
- new community takes over support
- commercial support always possible
- Free software has no value?
- Free software reduces costs
- Free software enables new processes
- Free software enables new business models
- Value is generated by customization and user acceptance
- I use commercial software because competitors can also use Open Source software?
- Competitors can also use commercial software
- In most cases, movement to Open Source creates advantage in competition
- less money for software
- more money for training courses
- more money for better products and services
