Image courtesy : http://blogs.sun.com

Open source software (UNIX and its plugins, other software) and web applications (Servers, forum applications, email applications, programming languages, etc.) have attracted the people all around the world. And they are gradually becoming the dominant in many areas. This is due to many important characters common to these open source software. I will describe some of them in this post.

The most significant attribute of any open source software or web application is the complete availability of the source code. This enables the developers to customize or improve these software and applications according to their requirements. Most of these are available for free download and usage. And they have a huge user and developer community around the world. Many of them contribute to the improvements of the software or web application. If anyone gets stuck with open source software or a web application, he/she can get help from the user and developer community. This is very important and economical compared to the high priced software and their vendors.

Open source software and web applications are always more reliable compared to others. When there are any bugs (errors) anyone can report to the main developer or company and they will fix it in the next release version.

As most of them are freely available and reliable, more than 50% of the computer users around the world use at least small open source software or a web application. But when it comes to web applications, open source web applications are dominating. For an example, if you take web hosting, Apache Tomcat server is dominating as a reliable and less complex server. And most of these tomcat servers run on UNIX based systems which are also open source. Due to this most of the web hosting services charge less for web hosting plans hosted in UNIX servers compared to Windows servers.

In my personal view, I think that the open source software will make the world happier and a safer place to live in the coming future. They will definitely win the competition with high priced software and web applications and more and more people will embrace the open source software and web applications saying BYE to the highly priced ones.