'Open source software helps simplify things'

Open Source Software is an interesting phenomenon, developed by highly competent people and is available with source code freely to everybody in the world.
This is in strong contrast to commercial software developed by companies, like Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, Symantic, who charge high prices for their software and don't make the source code available ever. Redhat, IBM, Suse, MySQL are big names making lot of profit out of open source software development, support and services.
These views were expressed by the LCCI President Mian Shafqat Ali, Convenor IT Committee Armaghan Saqib, Shoaib Hameed Khawaja, President Computer Society Pakistan, Zahid Hamid Khan, Member IT committee while speaking at a seminar organised by the LCCI IT committee, here on Saturday.
The speakers were of the view that there were many advantages of using open source software like no licensing costs, reliability, standards compliance, choice etc. But the biggest benefit of open source software is making things simpler.
They were of the view that computer hardware and commercial software is mostly developed in the West. These countries develop software and design business processes for their particular business environment. Commercial software companies like Microsoft and Oracle have their own profit-making agenda.
Since complex things give mental challenge, people spend a lot of time trying to understand what all these new features do. Viruses and hacking attacks from Internet have made maintenance of every single computer even more time consuming and costly.
Open source software helps simplify things by not giving bloated software or forcefully selling features, which are never required. Open source does not require the latest and greatest computer hardware saving us money. Businessmen could focus on their core business instead of always learning computers and solving its problems.
There are many open source software which are just being maintained with security and other bug fixes only. Developers of such software are not adding any features because they think that software does completely what it was intended to do.
Similarly, they maintained no open source software will disappear or get obsolete. This is a very important issue for maintaining valid data achieves which should be accessible even after decades thus making things simpler.
Open Document Format or ODF is an independent initiative, which is trying to standardise office documents format. Microsoft is fighting ODF with its own format just because ODF will make it irrelevant. Many businesses, especially small and medium sized companies in Pakistan are still not using computers, Internet and email. These businesses are afraid of the costs and maintenance hassle involved. There is another area where open source comes to rescue, that is, customised software developed in-house by companies. Traditionally this takes a lot of time and resources of a company who is the only customer of that software. With some creative thinking, simplicity and open source one could accelerate this sort of development and lower the costs, they observed.