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Can't Open Source and Proprietary Software Peacefully Co-exist?

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is asking a question that a lot of companies and individuals are evaluating: Could you switch over to being 100 percent open source? Adrian concludes that he could not, although he likes the concept, and a survey he has embedded in his post yields the same answer from almost half of respondents. Should we wish for a world of 100 percent open source software, though?

In Kingsley-Hughes' post at ZDNet, he poses a survey question to the reading audience: Could you switch over to being 100 percent open source? 45 percent of respondents say no, 28 percent say yes, 16 percent say they don't want to, 10 percent say maybe, and 1 percent say they don't know.

First of all, let's note that nearly a third of respondents say they could abandon proprietary software altogether, in favor of open source. Still, I happen to be with the 45 percent of respondents who say no, as is true of Kingsley-Hughes himself. He writes:

"I’ll start by saying that I couldn’t make the switch 100 percent. Partly that’s down to my work, both what I do here and elsewhere, but I also have to interact with folks who are very picky about file formats, and any messing about could cost time and money. It’s also down to the fact that I like messing with technology, and as I get older I find myself becoming more platform agnostic, not less. That said, if I could stick it to the man by giving Windows, Office, Photoshop and Premiere Pro the shove, and still do what I do, I’d be a very happy chap."

Although the majority of the software I use is open source, I still use proprietary applications some of the time. File format compatibility is occasionally a reason why, and there are also simply some proprietary applications that are capable of uniquely useful tasks. For example, I use numerous open source graphics applications all the time, but I still reach for Photoshop for some jobs.

The important point, here, though, is that there is room for co-existence of open source software and proprietary software, and there probably always will be. In my opinion, innovation would suffer if either faction of the software arena collapsed.
 

• open source
• GIMP
• Photoshop
• Proprietary Software

by Peter Vescuso on Jun. 18, 2009

I'm often in the position of evangelizing the use of open source components to accelerate development based the experience of many of my company's customers who make extensive use of open source. I've seen examples where a customer used open source for almost 90% of the code needed for an a new application. That's not the norm but it does show the potential, and besides who today can afford to expend the effort to reinvent the wheel if there's open source that meets the need?

Having said that I've also learned that most developers we deal with are very pragmatic about the code they use, i.e., if they use open source it's because it's better suited to their requirements than writing it themselves or using commercial code. Development has always been, and continues to be, very pragmatic. Fortunately open source can provide very pragmatic benefits.

What percent of open source makes sense? Hard to say in the abstract, although it seems that more open source code is being used today than ever before and that it will continue to grow, and in places maybe one would not expect. We recently announced ( http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2009-05-19 ) that the open source code from Microsoft's Codeplex repository is being added to our free open source code search site (www.koders.com) and in our Knowledgebase. Microsoft recognizes that developers face many choices of what code to use and has moved to embrace open source. We believe 'multi-source' is the development model that makes sense. It won't be 100% open source, it will come close in some cases, but effective development processes need to allow developers the tools and freedom to use what's best.

Peter Vescuso

Black Duck Software

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