When I was a schoolboy, we used to buy fruits from a lady almost for 10 years. Over a period of time, she won the confidence of many families and become loyal to each and every family. She used to sell fruits, some times vegetables, chillies, groundnuts and many other things. Most of the families in the campus bought things from her not only because she was loyal but also because of open business models. Whenever, she brought things to sell, she would give the specimen and only then would disclose the price. She had a simple and successful business model of making things open. She did not give something as free to sell her goods, she also thought that it was buyer's right to buy right and good things. There is no question on why this business model as successful. You can find similar business people in your life too.
This makes me to think and correlate with Open Source and the success of Open Source business models. When you are selling a software, how can you ensure that the software is good. And secondly, how will you convince your customer that you are infact giving them something good not crap. At a very surface level, you can do this by exposing your bug backlog, the bug trend, the reports from your dev/test team. However, this does not give enough information to your customers. This question is not about the confidence you have on your product. It is about the confidence of the customer you win. When make we the software open, we can see it in at least two perspectives - any can view/modify the source code and secondly we are open for comments.
By being open for receiving feedbacks gives us opportunity to correct something which is not good. The customers will be getting better things. The success of open source is not "free of cost" but "open for improvement". This should give confidence to the users that there is a community of developers who are working on making things better.
In this blog, I am planning to share my experience on Open Source Software, particularly quality enterprise class software which are much better than any proprietary software. I am also hopeful that in down the line, we will be discussing solutions from Open Source solving particular problem rather than software. This will give you a good picture about Open Source and its quality and innovation. This journey will also give me a learning by trying some open source solution which I never tried.
Hoping for the best
