What is vendor independence?

Question

hi all of you,

Can you please help me to know the meaning of vendor independence that provided by Free and open source software (FOSS)?

Answer 1

Vendors are usually the ones providing the software.

Typically with FOSS, you not only get source, but the free right to use the source, thus you are theoretically not dependent on a particular vendor, since you can take it and run with it yourself.

In practice, you may be dependent on patches if you are dependent on a particular version or flavor of the software which is not particularly popular or kept up to date and you don't have the ability to maintain or patch the software yourself.

So, like most things, it depends.