Open source software has proved to be beneficial to many people closely associated with the software industry, not to mention the fact that it has been good for Web Development as well. An open source software with an open source license essentially means that the software can be studied and improved or even customized by you.

There are several advantages of using open source software, the primary advantage being that there are several expert developers contributing towards the development of a software and hence it is most likely going to have loads of good features. However, despite the great many advantages there are several people and groups that believe open source software is one of the biggest mistakes of the software industry.

However several surveys and statistics that have been conducted on this topic and it has proved in favor of open source software. A popular survey conducted in 2014 had the following outcome:

• Approximately 9% of those who participated in the survey believed that open source software is less secure.
• However more that 35% believed that open source software was more secure.
• Additionally it was found that in a typical organization about 75% of their systems run on open source software.

Benefits of Open Source Software Development:

There are many benefits of open source software as mentioned here:

• Reliability: Open source software is in general considered more reliable than other software. The reason it is so is that an open source software tends to have fewer or no defects (bugs) as compared to a non open source software. At the same time any bug found is usually quickly resolved and the fix included in the next software update.

• Stable: Commercial software are stable although at times there may be issues and hence updates may be required for some or the other reason. Such updates usually come at a cost. In addition to which if a new version of a software that has better functionality and an interface update is released it will be an expensive upgrade for a commercial software. On the other hand with an open source software that is not the case. In fact an open source software usually has frequent updates making the software more stable and reliable.

• Cost: The cost factor is one of the biggest advantages of open source software.

Why many organizations prefer Open Source Software:

There are several reasons why open source software is good and preferred by many organizations across the world. The fact that the open source software means that it will usually be free is one of the most selling factors. However that is not the only reason.

One of the other important factors that makes organizations pick open source software the fact that it is high quality software. Looking at it from a different perspective, when so many expert minds are pooling their resources to make a software the outcome is likely to be good. And as expected open source software is usually developed fast and is of very high quality as well.

Besides it is often found that the with open source software usually good programming practices are usually followed which work out to be more efficient.

Conclusion:

Although open source software does not really mean free software, many of the open source software are free to download and install. Both the terms open source software and free software are very popular in the software industry and now they are also extensively used by many in the form of development software, browsers, operating systems, and even web development softwares.

Alakmalak is a web development firm that is involved in providing several type of websites to suit the client’s requirements. This includes open source softwares in PHP as well as custom PHP software development depending on which suits the client more.

Having developed more than 2000 websites for firms all around the world they are well placed and posses a highly efficient and skillful team of developers to get the job done.