After attending the week 9 KCB201 lecture at QUT this morning and listening to Axel Bruns podcast on slideshare I find myself pondering who to choose in internet providers, open source software (Mozilla Firefox) or proprietary software (Internet Explorer).
Proprietry software includes programs or internet products where the source code is closed, that is only paid staff can modify, add or build the program some examples include Microsoft Windows, RealPlayer, iTunes, Adobe Photoshop and Mac OS.
Open source software source code is left open that is anyone can see it or edit it under a limited-rights licence (Bruns) software is developed by teams of the community, there is a focus on user lead content, and some examples include Mozilla Firefox, Linux and Open Office. Open source software is all about releasing the best possible revised program immediately.
Open source software content can commonly be described as Produser lead where users actively work together to weed out the flaws, bugs and defects, that is finding quality from the masses. Generally it, "relies on the efficiency of its organisation" Jean-Michel Dalle how well the group of people working on the software can organise themselves to create a product.
Jean-Michel Dalle and Nicholas Jullien argue that, "the organizational structure of open-source software, allowed by openness of source codes and by the subsequent development of dedicated communities, is a key feature which, together with compatibility, can allow open-source software to overcome existing proprietary standards."
Overcoming proprietary standards is becoming an increasingly used term when discussing open source software. But this is not always the case, open source vs proprietary software is a complex argument and both have their pros and cons, definitely suited to different types of people as users or produsers.
Open source software has not been accepted by everyone and depends on the effectiveness of the organisation, if the group of people developing the software cannot work and organise themselves well together they may produce an inferior product. The survival of open source software relies heavily upon the community, the availability and its size, financial support- contributors are mostly freely contributing citizens, and there is a lack of financial support for solving problems. When comparing a company like Microsoft Windows (Proprietary) to open source (Linux), Microsoft can only employ a certain number of programmers and they can only do as much work as is humanly possible, with open source there may be thousands or millions of people working on a program.
Open source programming is always under construction, there is never a final product as there is with proprietary software, flaws or ‘bad areas’ are continually being edited to become better. Open Source programs are developed faster, there is no commercial package they are free to download. Open source software programmers make their money by selling their skills in consulting rather than software sales (teaching companies how to use the program, setting it up etc). Proprietary software may hold off releasing a new version so that they can get rid of/sell stock that has already been produced; this is not an issue with open source.
There has been considerable debate about open source vs proprietary software.
"Indeed, if open-source software was always to lose against proprietary software, then not only would it have attracted much less attention, but also it would clearly be of considerably diminished interest" Jean-Michel Dalle and Nicholas Jullien. Open source is an area of increasingly popularity.
As to which program is better, it certainly depends on how involved you are in the information technology world, or weather the company you are with decides to train staff on a new operating system and is willing to fork out the initial costs. I actually only discovered Mozilla Firefox a few months ago, it was suggested to me that I should try Firefox after internet explorer could not be used to access some of my lecture notes for university, and since I switched over I have found Firefox the better of the two for my own individual needs. I mean who hasn't come across that annoying message 'Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close' (this happened just 2 minutes ago) in that case loosing all of the work I had just done. Mozilla Firefox will recover lost work; I will be using Firefox from this point on.
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I've been using Mozilla since it was called Firebird and haven't looked back since. It's great that there's such a wide useage of Mozilla considering that it doesn't need a megalith corporation like Windows to push its browser product to the public.
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