"Open source software is currently transforming the way corporations build and deploy their strategic IT assets. The economics behind this trend are extremely compelling; by leveraging open source programming libraries for low-level tasks such as XML processing, handling network protocols and other applications, companies are able to focus their programming resources on higher-level tasks. This can provide dramatic increases in software development productivity.
"In addition, using open source libraries as part of the development process can also have a significant impact on overall software quality. Since the most common open source programming libraries are in extremely wide use, they benefit from having 'many eyes on the code'; that is, they get debugged faster since so many people are using and testing them. In the end, this "community debugging" process may be one of the greatest advantages of using open source software since it can result in very high levels of software quality..."
