Small Business Applications
Ninety percent of companies qualify as small businesses. Every day these employers have to deal with common computing problems, such as tracking electronic documents, scheduling, accounting functions, managing contact lists, and reducing spam. Many expensive software products are available to help solve these problems, but they often have features small businesses don't need (or are missing the ones they do). Open source software presents easy-to-implement solutions at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately, these solutions are relatively unknown to most small businesses.
If you are looking at operating costs, open source offers the least expensive computing environment for small business. While the quality of open source software varies from excellent to pre-alpha, the same can be said of proprietary software. Just take a look at some of the bargain bins at the local office superstore if you think all proprietary software is slick and polished. Care must be taken when choosing any software package.
Less than two years ago we evaluated our software needs and the cost of upgrading our OS licenses. We wanted to become fully legal and up to date with our software licensing. The desktop software licenses were going to cost approximately $1000.00 each, that was $8000.00 total in desktop software licensing. The servers were going to cost us approximately $4235.00 in software licensing, as we were going to upgrade to MS Windows 2000 Server and Exchange 2000 Server. This $12,235.00 figure was extremely high for our shop. We'd also have less available software, because we were not going to purchase software that wasn't absolutely necessary. This is when we looked into using open source. Open source software provided all the tools we needed for less than $100.00, total. Re-training cost was all we had to pay for, that payment would be in the form of time. When the estimated cost of retraining was compared to proprietary software's licensing fee's, we made the decision to migrate to opensource.
A major migration concern was the ability of open source software to read and write in proprietary formats. It seemed that everyone was sending Microsoft Word formatted documents and Microsoft Excel formatted spreadsheets. Our primary concern was Microsoft Office compatibility. Luckily, the amazing open source software developers have made great strides in the compatibility area.
Conclusion
If you are starting a business or already own a small business I suggest giving open source a try. The cost savings are incredible. Stability is exceptional. Compatibility is very good. You may choose to stay with the Microsoft Windows operating system, yet still save thousands by using open source software for the office suite, servers and image manipulation. If you choose to change the operating system to Linux or FreeBSD you will have increased stability, lower maintenance costs and excellent virus resistance.
The choice is ultimately yours, now that there is a choice!
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