Business Success with Open Source

Reduce Cost of Maintenance

When an artist creates a statue, she then displays it somewhere and admires the finished product. When a programmer creates software, she then has to maintain it. There’s no such thing as a “finished” piece of modern software. You’ll have bugs to fix, features to add, security patches to apply, and other necessities that ensure a piece of software is anything but a static creation.

If your company, stricken with NIH syndrome, has created all of its software from scratch, it then retains 100 percent of the responsibility for maintaining it for as long as it remains in use. This maintenance can be expensive, and it can consume programmer time that could otherwise go toward developing new features and products for your ...