Wheeler: Why Open Source Software/Free Software? Look at the Numbers!

“Some sites provide a few anecdotes on why you should use
OSS/FS, but for many that’s not enough information to justify using
OSS/FS. Instead, this paper emphasizes quantitative measures (such
as experiments and market studies) on why using OSS/FS products is,
in a number of circumstances, a reasonable or even superior
approach. I should note that while I find much to like about
OSS/FS, I’m not a rabid advocate; I use both proprietary and OSS/FS
products myself. Vendors of proprietary products often work hard to
find numbers to support their claims; this page provides a useful
antidote of hard figures to aid in comparing these proprietary
products to OSS/FS.

“Note that this paper’s goal is not to show that all OSS/FS is
better than all proprietary software. There are those who believe
this is true from ethical, moral, or social grounds, but no numbers
could prove such a broad statement. Instead, I’ll simply compare
commonly-used OSS/FS software with commonly-used proprietary
software, to show that at least in certain situations and by
certain measures, OSS/FS is at least as good or better than its
proprietary competition…”

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