November 24, 2007 9:10 AM PST
Efficiency is open source's greatest advantage, says Snort creator
Open source gives a company many advantages over the proprietary dinosaurs, but according to Martin Roesch, founder of the Snort project, efficiency may well be the biggest.
We get tremendous efficiency in our development. The size of our research and development team is very small compared to our competitors'. We use a lot of open source tools, we interact with our community, and have people who are long-time open source users who work here. We use it consistently; it helps reduce costs and achieve a lot of economy. I can't imagine how expensive it would have been to build this company without the open source world. We wouldn't have had the community hungry for the solution when it finally came to market.
There are other ways to develop and distribute software. They just happen to be wasteful and slow compared to open source. And yet many continue to slog through proprietary development because they erroneously believe it's the secret to outsized monetary rewards. They'll learn.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
So a lack of acceptance and standards that are based on what the consumer wants seems to be a huge problem. I have read numerous reviews of OO and while the spirited users of OO staunchly defend the OO standards, these are not standards that business and consumers embrace.
Efficiency? I would argue that this is simply not relevant. How can anyone argue with numbers?
With all of the free office suites as well as the myriad of other free software titles out there that despite the price being free for open source, consumers still are willing to pay for commercially produced software.
The fact is that the tiny minority of commercial and individual users that embrace open source should be a sign that where there is not a profit motive the final product is likely to be of a lower quality, or at least it is not going to be on par for what ever reason(s) with the commercially produced (mainstream) alternatives.
My spirit embraces free stuff, open source, community based...and so on. But my head and my logical side tells me that there has to be an incentive to want to produce, to want to build. If I am going to spend a lot of time and money developing something then I want something in return more than a few thank you's and a whole lot of complaints.