2. Financial Advantages of Open Source Software (OSS)
Numerous large organizations in both the public and private sectors have already adopted OSS software due to the enormous economic benefits it generates for
society and business, including the following:
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), as it is commonly referred to, is the purchase price of a good or service plus operating costs. For example, the TCO savings
associated with Operating Systems range from a minimum of 30% for a small number of users to a much higher percentage for a large number of users. TCO cost
savings include the following:
• Initial license or subscription fee for the software product (zero in the case of an open source software product).
• Maintenance, support and warranty costs including any direct or indirect costs associated with future updates/upgrades.
• Any costs associated with hardware or software tools to develop or test the software product.
• Any additional costs associated with software licenses, such as those associated with feature or functionality updates.
• Any license costs to access other 3rd party software.
• Any direct/indirect liability costs.
• Reduced Management Costs for Cybersecurity because OSS is typically more secure than CSS due to developers' proactive requests for the community to check for
security issues and, if any exist, to propose and implement a fix as quickly as possible. This significantly reduces the amount of time and money required to
manage software vulnerabilities. Additionally, OSS users are not required to use proprietary and expensive security suites like Norton, McAfee, Kaspersky, or
Bitdefender.
• Reduce Vendor Switching Costs (and Achieve Vendor Independence) - Proprietary software vendors (e.g., Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) are constantly tying Clients to
their software products for an extended period of time, and switching to a different supplier is typically a costly and time-consuming operation due to vendors'
non-universal formats and intellectual property restrictions (e.g. patent rights). Because of the openness of the software code, OSS firms cannot lock in their
clients, as it is very easy to reverse-engineer any data format and thus easily switch suppliers and achieve vendor independence.
REFERENCES:
• Economic Benefits of Free and Open Source Software: An Evaluation for Health Sector, M. Oğuz Arslan, Anadolu University, 2014
• Linux vs Windows – a cost comparison, Ken Leoni, 2018
• Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study, Ghosh et al. 2002
