Sun Federal President and COO Bill Vass continues to make the case that open source technologies are the best choice and offers a multitude of reasons (and blogs) to substantiate his point. Previously, he had outlined four reasons, including security, reduced procurement time, prevent vendor lock-in and reduced cost. Now Vass asserts open source offers better quality and a means to get specific requirements injected into a product.

Better Quality

Open source software requires its code be reviewed multiple times by multiple people. This translates into a higher quality and safer product than its proprietary counterpart, Vass explains. This is basically due to the number of people reviewing the product and the peer exposure that the code faces within the community.

"If you are a proprietary software developer, and your boss walks into your office and says 'Fix this before you go home,' you will just do whatever you need to get something working so you can head home. It's not as important to you how many memory allocation errors or security flaws you have, because your changes will be included in the next build, and odds are, that as long as it meets the functionality requirements (and does not crash), no one else will even look at your code," Vass writes. "But if you are an open source developer under the same pressure, once you complete that code, you have to submit it to the community for inspection. That community is an average age of 30, and has an average coding experience of 11 years, these are not amateurs. ... If they don't like how your code is written, they will criticize it like crazy,...much more aggressively than any product manager would with a proprietary vendor."

But besides the community review, the open source process requires an architecture review and possibly an IP infringement review if vendor support is going to be included.

"On average," Vass ascertains, "commercial open source products go through about 3x more formal reviews than proprietary products do, and have about 100x more people validating the code and the product."

Injecting Specific Requirements

The ability to engage with a community to get specific requirements into a product is Vass' number 6 reason why open source is the way to go. Customers do not have to just take what a vendor thinks they need, but can take existing open source solutions, join the community process and add the features that are right for them, he advocates.

"Open source code creates a vehicle for a community of developers (including government organizations and the SIs) to contribute creating applications that meet the government’s requirements," he contends. "Much like the community development process undertaken by the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN), open source put thousands of developers available to develop a truly customized solution made by the masses."

More Information

Reason No. 5 to Move to Open Source, Better Quality

Reason No. 6 to Move to Open Source, Injecting Specific Requirements

Why Move to Open Source? Security, Procurement Time, Vendor Lock-in and Cost

Sun\'s Free and Open Source Software [...read more...]

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