What are the advantages of open source software in the enterprise?

The most obvious advantage of open source software is the products are normally free to download, although it does incur running costs such as storage and computing power. Even those rare paid-for open source products still tend to be far cheaper than closed source alternatives. In fact, lower total cost of ownership was listed as the clear leading advantage to adopting open source software in Red Hat's research.

"Adopting open source software generally has a lower up-front cost (because the software often comes at no cost or relatively low cost), and shifts the cost centre from licensing (an operating expense) to customisation and implementation (a capital expense)," Balter wrote in his 2015 essay. "Additional costs like training, maintenance, and support are sunk costs. You’re going to be paying for both regardless of if the software is open or closed source."

Proprietary vendors don't only charge for the products purchased. They can also require pricey upgrades, support services and vendor lock-in costs.

"Enterprises that take a strategic approach to adopting open source claim that despite maintenance costs, training and other costs, it turns out that open source is secure and efficient enough while being overall also less expensive," said Diego Lo Giudice, vice president principal analyst at Forrester.

Nikos Terizakis, principal management consultant at HeleCloud, said: "These products have no initial license purchase cost so there is a lower cost of ownership. Furthermore, unless a support contract is purchased, there are no expensive maintenance or license renewal costs that can be as high as 20 percent - 30 percent per annum of the original license purchase costs in the case of commercial products."

That being said, cost savings are often not cited straight away when talking about enterprise adoption of open source, with access to innovation and the best technology a more positive message to spread.

Diego Lo Giudice, vice president principal analyst at Forrester said: "Experimenting with open source is easier than with commercial products. Developers can download and try free existing open source and then can decide if the technology is appropriate for their experimentation, if not they can change and experiment quickly with other components."

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"Open source is an enabler for innovation," said Kai Hilton-Jones, director of solutions engineering, EMEA at GitHub. "Enterprises now understand that the same culture and working methodology that drives innovation at speed in the open source community, also contributes to faster innovation inside the organisation."

Rob Whitely, CMO at web server specialist NGINX added that open source software is "nearly synonymous with innovation. It’s beloved by developers, and thus receives the majority of new, creative energy."

Commercial companies produce software according to the ideas and needs of their own business. These often don't directly align with those of their customers. Vendors can also reduce support and updates for commercial software that no longer generates enough income to justify their investment and wreak havoc for clients if they stop producing or supporting a product. Open source software reduces this risk by removing the financial motivations of a regular business.

It can also help users to escape monopoly pricing and incompatibilities. Proprietary data formats and systems that exclude competitors have little benefit for open source software developers, who are more willing to support interoperability.

Gerald Pfeifer, CTO at the open source vendor SUSE, said: "The idea of openness today is far reaching: We all know Wikipedia, which makes knowledge available publicly and for free. Open source in its original form applies to software, made available for free and as source code.

"This became particularly important for the tech community after vendors started using 'closed' code as a mechanism to create lock in and capitalise on that. With open source, on the other hand, everybody is able to examine the software, use and modify it at will, create something new collectively and share the outcome. This often forms the foundation for thriving communities around development and innovation."

Open source software offers a great degree of customisation through access to the code, and detailed tailoring can normally be done with only limited resources. If internal skills are insufficient, support is available from the project's developers, the open source community or any commercial expert who wants the job.

Kevin Deierling, VP of marketing at networking specialist Mellanox, said: "The customer - backed up by the community and supporting vendors - can quickly implement new features, customisations, or security enhancements and deploy and scale these quickly and cost effectively."

Fabian Hueske, a software engineer at Ververica, the creator of the stream processing framework Apache Flink, said: "Developers can customise the software, adding extra functionality or removing unnecessary parts to meet specific business requirements. Additionally, long-term projects requiring greater stability are the perfect fit for open source since the software is less reliant on a vendor and its developers working on it, but rather on a user and developer community devoted to supporting the technology for the long run."

As open source developers are primarily motivated by pride in their work and the opinions of their peers, they tend to focus more on the quality of their product while their commercial rivals might be focused on the bottom line. They're also part of a community that benefits from supporting one another. Many users correct bugs themselves.

As Balter wrote in his essay: "Open source provides three advantages: first, you have the opportunity to tap the knowledge of the world's best developers, not just those on one organisation’s payroll. Second, the number of potentially contributing developers and thus the potential knowledge pool is orders of magnitude larger.

"Finally, open source software gets adapted to a variety of use cases, not just the one the publisher originally intended, surfacing bugs and edge cases much more rapidly than traditional, predictive QA processes."

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As hinted at by Balter, open source's focus on quality also tends to lead to less bugs.

"If you consume open source software, it's in your best interest to contribute back. Contributions can be in the form of reporting bugs, or even submitting proposed fixes," he wrote. "Since software is written by humans, it's highly unlikely to be perfect, and even if so, likely doesn't satisfy every use case. Rather than forking the project and implementing changes into your own version (closed source), submitting bug reports and improvements upstream (open source) allows you to more easily continue to benefit from the subsequent fixes and improvements submitted by others."

Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO at the 'open-core' vendor Puppet, said: "Communities can drive projects towards radically improved quality relative to their purely commercial counterparts. As Linus' Law states: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." At Puppet, we'd be unable to effectively support a huge myriad of platforms, operating systems, and architectures without the help of enthusiastic community members."

Adopting open source software can also help with recruitment, which is vital in the current climate where access to quality developer and data science talent can feel like all-out war.

"Developers want to work on yet-unsolved problems," Balter wrote. "Open source allows you to showcase to the developer community, the interesting challenges you face, and how you think about solving them. Open source developers can casually contribute to projects, to learn how you work, and what it's like developing software for a particular set of challenges. If they like what they see, there's a much better chance that they'll apply for a job, than if your organisation was a black box when it comes to what it's like to work there."

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"In a world where developers are in short supply, contributing to open source communities and building an open source culture also enable enterprises to access, recruit and retain top talent," said Hilton-Jones at GitHub.

The input of a lengthy list of developers who are motivated to produce the best software possible will often lead to a superior product, and by having reusable components they are often freed up to focus on higher value contributions.

As Balter states: "Blogging, content management, and operating systems are all problems with established (and mainstream) open source solutions, to name a few. While your developers could spend their time reinventing wheels that the open source community have already perfected, it's far preferable to use the world's best wheel, especially when that wheel comes at no cost to you."

Open source software (OSS) tends to expose vulnerabilities for all to see, so there are many eyeballs looking out for risks.

"OSS is more secure," as Whitely from NGINX put it succinctly. "That may seem counterintuitive, but it goes back to one of the core tenets Linus Torvalds espoused when he created Linux: the wisdom of crowds. Having more eyes on software means more testing, bug fixing, and hardening. OSS solutions benefit from a degree of security rigour that most companies can’t match – either with software developed in-house or purchased proprietary offerings."

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The availability of source code makes it possible for users of open source software to review security and performance standards. This allows them to independently discover any shortcomings and make the necessary changes.

Darren Hitchcock, general manager at the open source Magnolia CMS, said: "Through its in-built openness and transparency, open source software can provide enterprise users with far greater flexibility and insight into what exactly is running on their systems. Traditionally, open source platforms provide clearer documentation, more frequent upgrades and regular downloads for testing purposes. All of these can help give enterprise teams a strong sense of security when it comes to developing their technology stacks."