Should a company select proprietary, open source, or free software for its most important business information systems?
When someone looks at the question above the first words that jump out at you are “most important”, so when making a selection between the different types of software most people would probably believe proprietary software to be the obvious choice. You could look at the definitions of the three and easily decide that open source software would be more convincing than the others. However, I would have to agree with those that argue open source should be the first choice for any kind of software because it allows code modification to customize the software for your company, and that proprietary software would only be an option if it had a very specific feature that open source/free software could not offer.
Proprietary software is defined as computer software in which the developer has set restrictions on use, private modification, copying, or republishing. Open source/free software are the exact opposite, the source codes are made available which permits the user to use, change, improve, and redistribute it in an unmodified or modified form. Recent observations have shown proprietary software developers are starting to realize open source software/free software development has been successful, so these companies have been paying more attention to incorporating open source/free software strategies into their business models. According to Matt Asay chief operating officer at Canonical, “free-software advocates provided the early backbone of the larger open-source movement, the market has been made by open-source backers.” He also goes on to say that, “the path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer's needs. After all, fierce partisanship and an unwillingness to compromise in software accomplishes is just as pointless, distasteful, and useless as it is in...