Open source software is displacing closed source software in businesses large and small across the entire IT landscape, in every department of business, on the internet, and even on mobile.

Today, instead of contributing to products that generate revenue based on licensing, forward-thinking software developers are riding the wave of the rapidly evolving open source software model. This business model is known as Software as a Service, or SaaS, and it is wreaking havoc on its slowly evolving, inherently restricted counterpart in the closed source world.

Practically speaking this means always being on the cutting edge of the latest software development.

The last 20 years have been incredible and unprecedented in terms of the effect of information technology on business. Companies like Microsoft that saw the wave of opportunity on the horizon positions themselves and their license-based software perfectly for a royalty driven future. In 1999, Microsoft seemed like an unmovable monolith in the technology world, an it’s license-based business model with it.

15 years later Microsoft struggles to find its meaning in a world where open source mobile phone operating systems like Google’s Android let developers write apps for their platform for free, creating apps that can do everything imaginable, all without the drag of expensive licensing on the innovation process. In the hardware world, Microsoft Windows struggles for its dominance as hardware providers break free of closed source specs previously dominated by Microsoft in favor of open standards which will drive our brave new internet of things.

Although your business is unique, your business is not unique when it comes to IT challenges. It is the innovative spirit of open source which is driving the rapid changes in technology that we have seen since dot coms and email became part of our everyday language in the business world and companies like Microsoft are struggling to keep up.

This is even more true for the smaller software vendors out there, the companies that are not known to the average user but specialize in things like file exchange, enterprise resource management, HR management, accounting, and even email services. Software vendors who bought into closed source architecture a decade ago are stuck with legacy products which are unable to keep up with the times. One by one these projects are losing ground to their more generalized, flexible open source counterparts. Developers that opted for solutions like Oracle technology to drive their application database needs today have to pay expensive licensing fees (fees that are passed on to customers) for something the open source movement can get for free in MariaDB, and tweak freely if they need to, and even freely rebrand if they need to.

Slowly but surely closed source software vendors are losing ground and falling behind the times. Don’t let your business fall behind with them. Your customers have come to expect the quality of experience they get in things like file exchange as they do with Google Drive or Dropbox. Your invoicing process should be as fast as Amazon’s, and completely accurate, everytime. When your product ships, your customer wants to know about it when it happens not after the fact, when your staff has time to sift through a stack of papers. Customers want to know their bill is due with a text message, like Verizon delivers when a bill is due.

All of these problems have been solved before and your business can do all of these things with open source technology…for free. Connect with us today to find out how we can help open source free your business from the costly legacy of license-based software.

Tap into the power of the global community of developers for your next IT project. Although your business is unique, your business is not unique when it comes to IT challenges. While closed source software vendors tend to focus on solving specific problems which are industry or even company specific, open source software developers focus on creating tools which solve the more general challenge: not collaboration tools for graphic designers, but collaborations tools for the entire organization; not just customer support tools, but tools to reorient your entire business toward satisfying customer needs.