10 Myths About Open Source Software Answered

“In 1999, Tim O’Reilly, founder of a popular open
source-oriented publishing house, gave a keynote speech to an
audience of Fortune 500 executives called ‘Ten Myths about Open
Source Software.’ As those myths are still perceived as true today
by some, as shown by recent reports1, and are still perceived as a
barrier towards FLOSS adoption, we will try to provide here some
pragmatic answers:

“Myth #1: It’s a Linux-vs-Windows thing.

“Recent debates about FLOSS continue to be focused on an
all-or-nothing perception; that, for example, to introduce FLOSS in
a company, a full software migration is required. This, and the
fact that there is limited knowledge of FLOSS projects outside of a
very widely known ones (like Linux, Apache, OpenOffice.org), has
created the perception that most of FLOSS is designed and directed
as a direct competitor of Microsoft’s own products. The reality is
that there is an enormous number of active projects in practically
every field of IT, including business-specific ones like ERP
systems, and most of these projects are cross-platform, and can be
executed on Microsoft Windows, Apple’s OSX (which is itself based
on more than 300 open source projects) or Linux…”

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