Comments on: Competitive advantage in Open Source http://blogs.linux.ie/balor/2006/02/14/competitive-advantage-in-open-source/ We eat cats whilst you code. Thu, 17 May 2012 00:31:11 +0100 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 By: Bart B http://blogs.linux.ie/balor/2006/02/14/competitive-advantage-in-open-source/comment-page-1/#comment-167 Bart B Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:50:10 +0000 http://blogs.linux.ie/balor/2006/02/14/competitive-advantage-in-open-source/#comment-167 Another major advantage of being able to tinker with the innerds of FOSS code is that you can mix and match different apps to get a killer app that does something very specific. I'll give an example, I am planning a killer, highly customised web portal for a group of astronomers, they want Wiki, Bulletin Boards, galleries with special astronomical metadata for the images and a few other things. If I user all FOSS I should be able to have one login system and tie it in to a BB system, a gallery system and a Wiki and also tweak each of the separate apps so it does exactly what we need. This gives me one highly customised killer app out of a collection of three or four FOSS apps from different people/companies. You just can't do that with closed source software! Another major advantage of being able to tinker with the innerds of FOSS code is that you can mix and match different apps to get a killer app that does something very specific.

I’ll give an example, I am planning a killer, highly customised web portal for a group of astronomers, they want Wiki, Bulletin Boards, galleries with special astronomical metadata for the images and a few other things. If I user all FOSS I should be able to have one login system and tie it in to a BB system, a gallery system and a Wiki and also tweak each of the separate apps so it does exactly what we need. This gives me one highly customised killer app out of a collection of three or four FOSS apps from different people/companies. You just can’t do that with closed source software!

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