Which is better?
The free-for-all community driven software or mature enterprise-grade production-ready commercial software?
Those supporting open-source software claim it has the obvious advantage of being free but more importantly, is developed by more community experts with more contributing hands. It’s likely to grow and fork faster into more exciting projects.
Those support proprietary software claim it’s more mature, secure, has more consistent support, and far more likely to stick around when there’s money in it to pay for top-level developers.
IMO, the answer is both. Having both open-source and proprietary around forces both of them to be better. They’ll compete and force each other to evolve faster. And both will steal the best from each other. Open-source will borrow from the most consistent and time-tested features of closed-source. And proprietary will take inspiration from the best of open-sources experimental features. For this reason, you’ll notice many companies with the freemium model.
Leave a Reply