The web development industry is relatively huge and it is consisted of a myriad of methods and technologies. New things are created, changed, maintained and destroyed continuously, making the Internet a highly dynamic place. Open source technologies are among the biggest upsiide of the Internet and it is known for the low overall costs. In general, we can’t compete with free implementations. The website development costs can be quite high if we use standard technologies. Although employees would do all the works, web development companies would need to buy software commercially.
Open source methods can be highly attractive if it is equally effective. However, open source software isn’t a cure-all implementation; we will need to use them properly for all tasks. We should try different solutions so they can be applicable in any situation. There are many amazing content management platforms that we can use without paying a single cent, such as WordPress, PHPNuke and Joomla. Considering that open source technologies are available freely in the market, it could mean that underpaid programmers and freelances are able to reduce costs and gain plenty of benefits. We should benefit significantly from the implementations of free software.
Commercial graphic-editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop can be very expensive for new web designers. However, there are free alternatives that they can use, although some of the advanced features are missing. It is also not necessary to use commercial FTP tools to upload and download files from servers. It is possible for us to save tons of money by using decent, free alternatives. By doing little researches, we should be able to come up with a list of possible alternatives to commercial software products in the market. Some hardware makers, such as Novell and IBM are also creating free software, because they don’t make money from selling software.
In this case, it isn’t necessary for people to spend too much on software. Microsoft and similar companies seem to be those that are affected by the open source trend. In fact, they have started to embrace the free software movement and with some pre-requisites, it is possible to get its latest software, such as Windows 10 for free. This something that Microsoft needs to do, because Google and Apple aren’t making money directly from Android and Mac OS X. The prevalence of open source technology is a new development in the software industry and new Linux distros are becoming as capable as Windows.
With open source implementation, we often use software with less comprehensive hardware requirements and in some cases, commercial software can be more than a few gigabytes in size. As comparison, open sources solutions are lighter and can be half in terms of resources and size. This would be useful for web developers who can’t afford high-end laptops. In this case, we should give open source solutions a chance and there are many solutions in the market that we should consider. It should be quite easy to use open source solutions for our web development purposes.