http://www.opensource.org/ is a website to promote the use of open source software and is an initiative that Cada Media Ltd have long been advocates of even since I was working as a programmer in Dublin in the Mid 90’s. Back then one of our team, a Russian guy called kyrill was asking the management to move to open source and put our code on-line for other developers to take up and use. It sounded crazy to the owners at the time as they had patents on the software and earned money each time it was sold, but it needed to be revamped and we didnt have the numbers needed to re-write the code from scratch.
£250,000 a year!
This was one of the programmers salary and without this guy the company wouldn’t have been able to continue. He had written the code in such a way that no-one else understood it easily and that code is often written in many files, so it would take a new programmer up to six months to get their head around what was previously written or coded.
Open up this code to other users via the Internet and then the program could have gained wings and been developed in various languages and additional features made. This is exactly the life cycle of open source. You upload the computer code to the internet, another programmer reads it and improves on it and passes it along.
International Skills at Local Level
Collective collaboration has meant that for small businesses such as our own, by using open source software has meant that we can use knowledge of programmers around the world without the overheads. Yesterday, whist giving a training session in a content management/ portal system called Joomla, the person being trained discovered that their are thousands of websites running on Joomla and their is a wealth of resources online for him to study.
New Customers
By adapting this open source early on has meant that we can actually get customers easily and they are not afraid of being locked into a particular package with licensed software as with other content management systems. For instance did you know 12% of the worlds website are run using wordpress.org ?
For more information on how open source software can help run your business whilst reducing costs and increasing efficiency then call Dave Jordan of Cada Media today on 053 9430748
More Blog post about open source
https://blog.cadamedia.ie/websitedesign/open-source/
https://blog.cadamedia.ie/2010/02/do-people-still-use-microsoft-office/
https://blog.cadamedia.ie/2009/11/how-to-impress-your-boss-in-a-recession/
https://blog.cadamedia.ie/2009/09/what-email-program-to-use/
