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Why Every Company Should Be Thinking Open-Source, But Many Still Aren't

This article is more than 9 years old.

Open-source software solutions are more secure, offer better data privacy, are customisable, can be cheaper and are often of a higher quality than their proprietary counter-parts. Yet up-take in the US and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions remains slow, according to a new survey from the Ponemon Institute - a research centre for information security policy.

A growing interest in security - particularly in the EMEA region - has set some companies to looking at open-source solutions to maintain security and data privacy in areas such as email, ‘cloud’ services and file transfer.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, a solution originating from a commercial open-source development is more likely to be secure than its fully proprietary or community open-sourced counter-parts, says Olivier Thierry, chief marketing officer (CMO) at Zimbra, a commercial open-source solutions provider that sponsored the Ponemon Institute survey. Although opening proprietary code up to a community of outsiders might seem like a good way to let hackers and other malicious players discover vulnerabilities, the opposite is true, he adds.

Instead a community quickly becomes a self-regulating body. “Developers and coders will look at an area of your code and go: ‘Is this an issue or a possible security violation?’ There’s significant insight from the community,” he says. “This is understood by new developers and IT specialists who often form that community, but not necessarily by older brand IT. They were weaned on the thought that it could only be proprietary software that is quality and secured.”

Open-source software also provides greater reassurance through transparency, Thierry says.

“If your firm use an open-source product, it has the ability to ensure that developers have employed the right patches,” he says. “There’s the ability to independently verify that as opposed to proprietary software where you have to simply take the word of the development company code writers that they’ve patched it, that the quality of patching is right and it covers the right exploits.”

But security isn’t the only reason why open-source software could create business opportunities. Commercially backed open-source can beat its rivals in other areas such as quality, costs and flexibility as well as modification.

Bugs are sorted in much the same way as security risks, says Thierry. Every bit of code and every change or modification is scrutinised by a larger community of experts than even the largest proprietary developer would be able to provide. “If you’re submitting code into the developer community, it better be good, else you’ll get slammed pretty quickly,” he adds.

This is supported by the Ponemon survey, which found that 66% of US IT specialists, and 55% of EMEA IT specialists thought open-source solutions were better than proprietary because they would find less bugs while 63% in the US and 60% in EMEA thought that overall quality would be boosted.

Equally open-source products are almost always going to be more customisable than their proprietary counter-parts. You can take a product and framework and then add your customised workflows, says Thierry. “It’s completely customisable and you can’t do that with proprietary software,” he adds. “Instead of having a one-size-fits-all solution, you’ve got software that can be custom-fit – and that is going to be better for security, employment flexibility and cost.”

And cost has proven to be a bit of a two-edged sword - to use a cliché - for open-source products. While many open-source products are available free, or at a fraction of the cost of their proprietary counter-parts - for example GIMP in image manipulation and Scrivener in writing applications - this has also created something of a negative stigmatism.

“If it’s not the price of a Rolls Royce, it can’t be rolls Royce thought many businesses,” says Thierry. “There was a certain stigma: You can’t trust it, it might be infected and it can’t be very good as it’s not expensive certainly not as good as a proprietary system.”

And it is this perception that has likely contributed to open-source’s slow growth in the business world - according to Ponemon, business IT specialists reckon that the commercial open source solutions make up around 30% of their businesses’ total applications in the US and 25% in EMEA.

But that perception is changing. More blue-chip companies - like Comcast in the US and La Poste in Europe - as well as governments are turning to open-source solutions, says Thierry. And with interest in privacy and data security growing - particularly in the EMEA region - open-source solutions are only going to increase in importance.