Regular readers of this blog know that I am a strong advocate for Open Source in this cloud based world. In fact, I have argued many times here that Open Source is equally important as Open Standards in ensuring the freedom of the users. I am going to push this meme again here quoting a back of the envelope calculation regarding the costs associated with proprietary license path and open source path in the case of a scale-out model.
Old wine in a new bottle, Huh?
I am sure many would have heard the arguments regarding better ROI, lower TCO, blah, blah, blah about Open Source economics. Even though there are some hidden costs involved with Open Source, it does offer better economics than proprietary software. In fact, there are not many proprietary software that can win the game on pure economics alone. They need to bring in other factors to make it competitive. Please check out this post to learn about relevant use cases. The economic advantage of Open Source is even more visible in the case of cloud computing because it is a scale-out model than scale-up.
