Why buy expensive software or spend millions to develop it yourself? You can get complex systems at absolutely NO COST! Yes, instead of having highly paid programmers at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, or even Blackboard build your critical university systems, you can have scores of software gurus scattered around the globe working completely independently build them for you FOR FREE. These folks are some of the same great people who are supposed to be working for you anyway, plus a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.
This is the alluring pitch of open source software. We may have to give up project planning, quality control, coding standards, accountability, version control, and support, but it’s FREE and we get the ability to modify the source code ourselves, something that is extremely dangerous to do, was discredited decades ago, and few people do anyway.
Link: www.syllabus.com
Category:
- Free Software
