“What do you do when your off-the-shelf software lacks all the
features you want? If it’s Open Source software, you can modify the
program yourself, if you’ve got the time and expertise, but then
you have to worry about supporting your mods, and whether they’ll
work when a new release comes out. You can ask the program’s
developers and hope they’ll do what you request within a useful
time frame. Or–in some cases–you can pay the developers to add
the features you want, in the timeframe you want, as part of the
main release.“For example, Legal Aid Manitoba relies on a program called
Childview, which it had been running under Windows 98. Faced with
the need to continue supporting its 150 employees in seven offices
on an annual budget of CA$333 per user, the organization looked at
migrating to Linux as an alternative to a much more costly hardware
and software upgrade to Windows XP…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
LinuxToday is a trusted, contributor-driven news resource supporting all types of Linux users. Our thriving international community engages with us through social media and frequent content contributions aimed at solving problems ranging from personal computing to enterprise-level IT operations. LinuxToday serves as a home for a community that struggles to find comparable information elsewhere on the web.
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