Software Development

Open Source Software is Free..
to Use, to Modify, and to Redistribute

Many organizations adopt open source software because it is free to use – it’s a great deal. Also, depending on the license, open source software can be free to modify and redistribute. This opens endless opportunities to create your own solutions starting with existing open source.

Breaking the Bonds of Proprietary Software

When you use proprietary software that you purchase from a commercial vendor, you get what you get. If something isn’t quite right for your organization, you can make a request for a change – which can be rejected or take a long time, or you can migrate to another vendor’s solution – which can be very expensive and take a long time.

Open Source Means You Can Have It Your Way.

There are several scenarios in which you might want to modify open source from its existing code base. You might have an urgent need to fix a bug that is not a priority for the community that maintains the library you are using. Your organization may need to add a new feature to an open source library to enable a new business strategy. Or you may have an idea for new software that can leverage existing open source libraries as a means to accelerate development.

How Developing with Open Source Works

How Developing with
Open Source Works

Having access to the codebase is a necessary, but not sufficient, requirement for successful development. With any software, prior knowledge of the codebase greatly reduces development time and increases how much a developer can accomplish. OpenTeams partners are experts in open source software development and often include staff who have contributed to the libraries they work with giving them a distinct edge for development projects.

With open source development, there are essentially two choices for maintaining the modifications you make to the open source library. First, you can choose to maintain a separate branch of the library to guarantee that your modifications will always be available. That requires ongoing work, indefinitely. Second, you can work with the community that maintains the existing library to convince them to adopt your modifications into the main branch which they maintain.

Different Forms of Open Source Software Development

Different Forms of Open Source
Software Development

Bug Fixes

All software has bugs. And all development teams have a list of bugs they plan to fix. Open source software is no exception. If you determine that a bug in a library you are using is a critical problem for your organization, you can request that the open source community maintaining the software fix the bug. However, the community sets the priority and they may have many bug fixes in the queue ahead of yours.

An alternative to waiting for the community to fix your bug is to hire developers to fix the bug and get it integrated into the library you use. Both fixing the bug and getting the community to accept the fix into the library is much easier if the developers have experience with the library and connections in the open source community. OpenTeams partners have that experience and those connections.

New Features

Your organization may need to add a feature to an existing open source library to solve a particular problem or enable a new strategy. Open source software allows you to do this by creating a new branch of the library and adding the feature you need to that branch. You might choose to maintain that separate branch as a new library, or you may choose to offer the feature to the community to integrate into the main library.

Whether you plan to maintain your own branch or work with the community to adopt the new feature into the main library, the chances for successful development and maintenance of your feature are greatly improved if the work is done by developers who have experience with open source software and communities.

New Products and Solutions

Nearly all new software includes open source libraries as “components” that provide functions common to many applications. Examples are: libraries that provide complex numeric functions; libraries that provide graphics rendering; or libraries that interface to standard resources such as databases just to name a few. There are millions of such libraries available.

Whatever software your organization intends to create, it would make no sense not to tap into all the great work that has been done and is freely available in the form of open source libraries. OpenTeams market network makes it easy to locate developers who have experience with the library that will cut time and cost from your development project.