SparX - Solutions par eXcellence

The open-source model has a lot to offer the business world. It's a way to build open standards as actual software, rather than paper documents. It's a way that many companies and individuals can collaborate on a product that none of them could achieve alone. It's the rapid bug-fixes and the changes that the user asks for, done to the user's own schedule.

The open-source model also means increased security; because code is in the public view it will be exposed to extreme scrutiny, with problems being found and fixed instead of being kept secret until the wrong person discovers them. And last but not least, it's a way that the little guys can get together and have a good chance at beating a monopoly.

Of all these benefits, the most fundamental is increased reliability. And if that's too abstract for you, you should think about how closed sources made the Year 2000 problem worse and why they might have very well killed your business.

Gerald P. Weinberg once famously observed that, "If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization." He was right. Up to now, the reliability of most software has been atrociously bad.

The foundation of the business case for open-source is high reliability. Open-source software is peer-reviewed software; it is more reliable than closed, proprietary software. Mature open-source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets.