Problems+with+Open+source+software

Making money through traditional methods, such as sale of the use of individual copies and patent royalty payment, is more difficult and sometimes impractical with open-source software. This complaint is countered by a large number of alternative funding streams such as: > > > Studies about security in [|open-source software versus closed-source software] show that closed-source software have fewer advisories but open-source software usually has less time between flaw discovery and a patch or fix. However, having the source code for a program could also make it easier for a malicious person to discover security vulnerabilities that they can take advantage of (instead of reporting or fixing them).
 * Giving the software for free and instead charge for installation and support (used by many Linux distributions)
 * Make the software available as open-source so that people will be more likely to purchase a related product or service you do sell (e.g. OpenOffice.org vs StarOffice)
 * Cost avoidance / cost sharing: many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share development costs (this is the genesis of the X Window System and the Apache web server)

Click [|here] to view arguments based on open source and close source.

//Written by Omar, Created by Cannelle Cuvelier//