Starting a business, even if it's part time and home based, can be tough. Every expense is a big one if you're still working to make your first sale!
A lot of business owners lower their start-up costs by cutting corners and “borrowing” software from their friends and associates. While this practice is common, it's definitely not legal.
Certainly the odds that you will be the one that gets caught and made a public example of are very low, but if you've ever bought a lottery ticket then you've bet on low odds before. If you had a chance of winning big in the lottery, you have at least the same chance of getting caught with illegal software. Why take that bet if you don't have to?
A lot of start-ups simply can't afford to shell out a few thousand dollars on legal software. But now you can get your business running, stay legal, and save money!
These days it's possible to run a business on completely free Open Source Software. Starting with the Linux operating system. There are high quality applications and user friendly installation procedures that finally make it practical to start and run a business without buying a single application.
You can even save money on hardware. Some major computer vendors (Dell computer, for example) are now shipping some systems with Linux pre-installed. A system sold like this is less expensive because it doesn't include the built-in cost of a Windows license.
Today's Linux offers a lot. There are user friendly graphical desktop interfaces, and powerful office suites that support common file formats like Word and Excel. There are very good packages for mail, instant messaging, accounting, databases, even sound and video.
Is this all too good to be true? Partially. I'm going to take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using open source software:
1. Learning Curve. Odds are pretty good that you are at least familiar with a proprietary operating system and its applications. Moving to a new and slightly unfamiliar look and feel can be disconcerting. However I've found that most people adapt to the change pretty quickly, and many of them love features that they never had in their old system.
2. Support. There's three kinds of support to discuss.nna) Support from your personal network. If you're a Windows user, chances are pretty good that you have an associate or two that you can call up and ask for help. But the odds that you know a local Linux guru are pretty small (although they do get better every day). So how do you solve a problem? Through the user community! Every popular Open Source Product has an active and supportive user community. In the same cooperative spirit as the product developers, many users are happy to offer help and create great documentation through wikis, discussion forums, and mailing lists.nnb) Support from a software vendor. Commercial software vendors usually offer very limited free support after purchase, then they want you to pay per-call, or to sign you up for a support contract. All this so you can spend an hour on hold only to be told your problem will be fixed in the next version – which you have to pay more for, of course! In the open source world, you usually have at least three choices. The first is free community support. The second is commercial support from your Linux vendor. Organizations like Ubuntu (
http://www.ubuntu.com) offer paid support options for their distributions. The third is to find a good local expert who can provide assistance, and that brings me to the last kind of support.nnc) Troubleshooting and maintenance. Open source software tends to move at a quicker pace than commercial software. The good part of this is that bugs get fixed more quickly and new features arrive sooner. The downside is that it takes more work to keep up to date. The other challenge is that if something goes wrong with your system, it can be harder to find someone to help. The best way to handle this is to build a relationship with a local certified professional. There's a number of certification programs available, which can be a little confusing. Some are operated and managed by Linux vendors like RedHat, and some – such as the Linux Professional Institute (
http://www.lpi.org) – are vendor independent and sponsored by industry heavyweights like IBM and Novell.
3. Security. Linux is inherently more secure than Windows. Not only does Linux do a better job of defending your system from external attack, it does a better job of protecting you from yourself. Have you ever hear of someone who crashed their system or broke an application by deleting a bunch of those pesky DLL files that they “never used”? It's a lot harder to do something like that in Linux. Ever discover that one of your kids played havoc with that big business proposal without realizing the consequences? It's a lot harder to do something like that in Linux.
Every complex system has security vulnerabilities. In the commercial software world there's still a tendency to try to keep those problems under wraps and fix them in the next release. In open source, the usual approach is to find a fix as quickly as possible and push a new version out ASAP. The quicker the fix, the lower the risk.
4. Availability of Applications. It's true that there's a lot more commercial software out there than there is open source. If your industry needs a specialized application that's only available commercially, then Linux might not be the right choice for you. On the other hand, there are a lot of great programs out there. There's literally tens of thousands of solutions available, and the chances that one of them does what you want are pretty good and getting better all the time.
Should you stay legal and save a lot of money by choosing Open Source? In the end, that's a personal question that only you can answer. I hope that by reading this article, you feel more comfortable with taking a serious look at what the Open Source world has to offer and make an informed decision that fits your requirements.nn[Non-disclaimer: I am not a certified professional nor do I have any affiliation with any of the organizations mentioned in this article. These are my independent opinions.]