Open-Source: Affordable & Accessible Digital Transformation in the Philippines

The simple first response is, the expense. Open source is free, so the company can drastically reduce the costs and time taken to make the necessary instruments or components of the product from the field. The less money you invest on your product, the lower the final price of that product is. This becomes much more important for startups that are actively aiming to cut costs and sometimes forced to change the product in case it was not as effective as expected. That being said, every year, several more benefits inspire enterprises to turn to open source. Let’s list them as the top 6.

#5. Everyone and anyone can help

There is a huge and tight community behind any great open source software, meant to make it even more popular, secure and versatile. But when several people work together to create a single product, the synergy tends to be very good.

Community developers enjoy what they do and are driven by peer approval, which in turn provides the high quality of work and passion for the best possible product efficiency, simplicity, and sustainability. That is why open source software is also highly usable, accurate, and stable, and any bugs discovered are generally patched within hours.

In considering switching from proprietary software, the presence of a great community behind a product is a great consideration on its own. However, if you need to adapt the open-source solution to specific business needs or simply need a pro for consultations and advice

#4. You don’t have to pay for licenses

You can usually delve deeply into the code of the product you are using and change it, as you would like when using open-source software. That means that for your own particular needs, you can also adjust such software, modify it in case you see it should be done in some other way, and change it for free constantly. However, the most significant benefit of all these possibilities is that everything can be accomplished.

On the contrary, proprietary tools may have additional restrictions on their use, which implies that you may need to look deeply into user agreements and privacy policies to ensure that all you do with such products is permitted.

#3. Speedy Solution Delivery

You can solve various tasks in no time thanks to the large range of software, plug-ins, plugins, and only bits of code accessible over the Internet. Visualize a few cases:

You have a minor technical issue, which can be solved by connecting to your software system a special unit. You may spend hours remaking it from scratch, or minutes to download, checking, and setting up an open-source tool that suits the specifications precisely. It’s the condition in industries that occurs very frequently.

The new applications for your new project have to be selected. Not only do you need to verify that the alternative has the requisite features, but also make sure that the management will accept this action and are capable of paying for it, which can take several weeks, if not months. You will immediately make the decision for yourself in the case of open-source, so you don’t rely on the money of the company.

To solve a particular problem, you want to make use of the given tool, but you are not sure what is the right way to do it. You could either read the documentation, which is always explained quite thoroughly, or ask the team of developers for guidance in the case of open-source software and be sure to answer quickly. You could get into trouble in any of these strategies for proprietary applications.

You discovered a bug in the device you wanted to use to make a product of your own. You could patch it on your own or at least submit a bug report when it comes to open-source software. While in the case of proprietary software it can take days if not weeks, depending on the company’s versatility, but thanks to the highly active team you will have the problem patched within hours.

#2. Everyday Evolution

When a small number of developers build proprietary software, they are forced to restrict themselves to all these things: finances, features, time. The really great software at first strives for excellent quality in the case of open source, but it is easily updated and extended even after the launch with various plugins and modules that users do not just wait for, but produce for their own needs and then share with the community.

Another feature of open source software is that it is suitable with proprietary standards. For example, to be more accessible to a potential user, most open source document tools can open Microsoft Office documents. On the other hand, unless they have become globally famous for some reasons, the proprietary tools are not expected to properly support open source formats.

Open-source software is widely used by big companies all over the world including; Android, WordPress, ERPNext, Moodle, MySQL, and even Linux. That means that the basic concepts used by large corporations are actually open-source software. Here in Hooman, we use open source software to deliver solutions that are affordable and accessible for Filipinos.

Of course, when it comes to choosing software for a large corporation, you want to reduce the risk of switching to other software by taking the option to offer more flexibility and efficiency. You can always create it by yourself (or hire us to create it for you) if the open-source solution of your choice does not have what you need.

#1. Security

It will seem controversial that, due to its public accessibility, open-source software is more secure. It is, however, the open-source method that greatly improves the number of individuals who search and easily fix bugs in the software. In simpler words, the more people checking on the program, the faster it is to solve or fix the problems that may occur. A great security indicator on its own is the fact that the software has a large community around it, which is involved in making it better and believes in its future potential. Although, we are not implying that all of the open-source software is always more secure. But there is a big percentage of success that open source tools are protected well, to be safer double-check the information of selected products. However, to be secured, it is often advised to follow news and update such software as frequently and quickly as possible to keep it up-to-date and secure.

Open source software companies usually finance support and maintenance that is why they do not have enough money to cover better marketing and to compete with proprietary software creators. As a result, bigger companies win the hearts of potential users, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that their product is always better. It is why open source software is still not used by a lot of companies. Although, there are some instances where companies use both open source and proprietary software. That is why we don’t necessarily force everyone to switch to open source software. Two of well-known online applications; Facebook and Google use both open source and proprietary software. Here in Hooman, we use our skills and the things we learn together with open source software to provide affordable and accessible digital experiences for human solutions. Learn more about our process