What are the advantages of Commercial Software vs. Open Source Software?

Question

I know many advantages of Open Source Software. But what are the advantages of Commercial software from customer view? When should I use/buy a Commercial Software instead of a Open Source Software?

Answer 1

Advantages of commercial software:

• most of the time there is a good support team
• you can pay for extra functionality
• as a programmer, I got a pay check each month ;-)

So you trade money for a bit of extra security. And I know not all software vendors are very good at post sales services. But because open source development is almost always volunteer work, you can't expect the impossible (at least not on your conditions).

Answer 2

Sometimes you can't find a good open source implementation of a software you need or want. In my case I'm looking for a good open source .NET Profiler - but I don't find one.

The options you have in such a case are:

• implement one yourself
• wait, until someone implements it
• buy the comercial software

Another case for buying one may be better support (for money, of course).

Answer 3

sometimes, commercial offerings have better documentations and feel more 'finished'. that's usually because a development company can pay non-developers to do those chores.

case in point: technically the best email servers are all open source; but the one i use, and recommend when there's money on the table, is CommuniGate, from stalker software. why? because it's really easy to use and administer. besides, it's solid and very well documented.

of course, it's almost the only non-OS software i recommend...

Answer 4

The theory, at least:

• If something goes really wrong, you can sue
• If you've got a support contract, you shouldn't be hit by "the sole developer is on holiday"
• You have a greater "right" to demand backward compatibility etc

It all boils down to commitment - the idea that a company is more likely to be committed to a project than a bunch of developers doing it for fun. I suspect it holds water in some cases, but far from all.

Answer 5

I suppose that varies from product to product. I would think, that if you are strictly a customer when it comes to this product, there are no real advantages in either way. I would suggest using commercial software over the open source equivalent only if commercial product has live support for it's paying costumers (and you do feal you will need and use such a service), and the open source product doesn't.

This is just from the top of my head and I'm sure there are tons of things I don't know about Open Source Software, so in case I'm wrong, please bear with me!

Answer 6

There is no hard and fast rule on this.

Genrally, the further you get away from technical infrastructure (OS, database, crypro libraries) and utility software (Editors, Spreadsheets, Web Servers etc.) the less likely you are to find a decent OS project to support your requirements. For instance I dont know of any decent OS warehouse management software, or, any decent OS medical appointment software.

There are many cases where the OS options is far better than the commercial options, but, the same number of cases where the reverse is true. Its mostly a question of carefully evaluating the available software against your particular requirments.

Answer 7

These are some general arguments in favour of commercial software over open source:

• Better, richer product since a company is relying on it to have revenue
• Better support (will fix bugs in time, provide updates, add extra functionality)
• More secure (We can't trust open source as secure since anyone can drop in a back door or a trojan horse)
• For a niche market, there are no mature open source projects available.

These of course aren't generally true. I know of commercial projects being worse than open source alternatives in many ways. And there are open source projects of excellent quality and many support services available.You always need to do a product-by-product comparison.

Answer 8

I think you are confusing two totally different things: commercial vs. non-commercial software and open source vs. closed source software. Those two have nothing to do with each other: there is a lot of commercial open source software and there is a lot of non-commercial closed source software.

All of the advantages of commercial software apply equally to open source and closed source. All of the advantages of open source apply equally to commercial and non-commercial. Thus, you can actually combine all those advantages by buying commercial open source software. (And even if that is not possible, you can very often buy commercial support for non-commercial open source software. Just like you can buy Windows support from companies other than Microsoft, you can also buy Linux support from people other than Linus Torvalds.)

So, to answer your original question:

When should I use/buy a Commercial Software instead of a Open Source Software?

Yes. :-)

Answer 9

I'm assuming that you mean opensource vs. closed source products here. The only reason I can think of is that

1. You (usually) get extensive documentation. At least from major products.
2. Some managers have more confidence in things they pay for. Paying for license somehow makes them feel better.

Answer 10

Hmhm - your question was not really specific enough, it can be interpreted as:

1) open source vs. closed source 2) free (from cost) vs. commercial

This obviously gives 4 possible combinations (ignoring all the variations on licencing and openness...).

So lets talk about free vs. commercial alone:

obviously from a customer's point of view, free looks much better immediately and I cannot add much to what the others already wrote.

In addition to liability issues (which also been already mentioned), I'd like to ask you to think what would happen if there was ONLY free software: If no one made any money from it, many of us programmers would probably loose our jobs. In the end, you'd only get free support from freelancers, which are mostly students and spare-time programmers (aka those who can afford this kind of self-exploiting of labour). But those might change their mind at any time to look for something more interresting. Without free support, who would provide commercial support. Well, I'd do it, but for a high price (especially, if there are not many others willing to support that stuff)! So, in the long run, you will probably pay the same or more; not for licences, but for support.

I think that that is backed by some of the projects we made in the past - some were replacing existing stuff which was based on freeware for which no support was found or for which the support costs were exploding.

That may not be true for things like compilers, linux and other base-software. But, who pays for that ? Isn't it mostly tax payers (who finance schools and universities) and students (who pay with their labour ?)

So (IMO) there must be always a certain money to be flowing in order to keep those programmers alive, and your licence fee will be your little part to keep it going.

Answer 11

There's a simple answer to this: when buying software, you should always evaluate your alternatives. I could give you a lot of general answers to the question, but they would just mislead you. Why? Well, they aren't true in every case (or possibly even the majority of cases).

I would argue that you should try out the open source alternative first. Think of it like a full-featured free trial that doesn't expire! If you try it out and don't like it, you haven't lost anything other than the time you put into it (which you hopefully would have put into it anyway).

Answer 12

The most important reason to select traditional commercial is that that's what there is. Open Source does not tend to attract people to the big and thoroughly unsexy applications that businesses need. It's possible that a consortium would get together to open-source software like SAP and PeopleSoft, but I don't expect it. Niche markets will usually be traditional commercial (and expensive).

Only if there is a choice between closed-source and open-source does your question make sense.

A commercial vendor may or may not provide better support. I've had good support and bad support from both open and closed source, both noncommercial and commercial, and the best and worst were both closed-source commercial. The disadvantage closed-source has here is that support is at the discretion of the vendor. If the vendor doesn't address your needs, or doesn't upgrade as you need, or discontinues the product, you're potentially screwed. With open source, you can always get customization done, although it may be expensive.

Liability is an often-cited advantage of commercial, but in fact a commercial vendor will almost always disclaim all liability. Volunteer open-source projects are marginally more likely to disclaim liability, in that they always do (in my experience). The "somebody to sue" principal just doesn't apply in real life. (I exempt such things as medical control software, avionics, and reactor software, since I just don't know about liability here.)

There are other bogus arguments. Some people are more comfortable paying for what they use than not paying. Some people are also leery of license trouble, although open source licenses are overall easier to understand, in my experience (a large part of this is that they are heavily reused, whereas proprietary licenses tend to be written uniquely. Understand GPLv2 and you understand the license of a whole lot of open source software; understand an Adobe license and it won't help you understand a Microsoft license.) There are people on both sides (open-source and commercial closed-source) who would make decisions based on ideology, but that shouldn't be a major consideration in the real world.

Commercial closed-source software is likely to be better polished than open source. There will be a tendency for the traditional commercial to be easier on the user and harder on the administrator. This doesn't apply in all things, so deal with it on a case-by-case basis, and on the basis of your needs.

Another issue is training. There's a lot of people who know how to do basic things on office software, and have problems moving to another system. You'll find more people who can use Word without thinking about it than the OpenOffice.com equivalent. There are plenty of people who can use Outlook for email and have problems with Thunderbird. This is a consideration particularly with low-level come-and-go employees using common software (like Microsoft Word).

Then there's software compatibility, which tends to be something of a lower priority in open source. In a Microsoft environment, another Microsoft product is going to fit in better than anything else. There's businesses who rely on some hacked-together Excel spreadsheet that won't run on anything besides Excel. Lots of software is produced for recent versions of Windows only, producing a network effect.

Some software is better than others. I'd recommend Firefox over all competitors as a browser, and some people recommend Visual Studio over all other development environments.

I would like to see people evaluate their options, with realistic expectations, and make rational decisions. Sometimes it even happens!

Answer 13

I you want to look good, wear a suit. If you want to impress customers, finish the project faster.