What does open source mean for you?
It means collaboration
For us, open source is the practice of sharing the development effort. What we do, we give back to the community, and in return, the community gives back what they do to us. Should we find a bug in the software we use, we can fix it. And if we can't fix it, somebody else can. It means that you, together with us and the community, can overcome the problems. It means you can rest assured we will never blame Microsoft.
It means liberty
Traditional application development is done by a small set of consultants working on your project. They may be a small company, or a project group in a large consultancy, but the developers are invariably a small groups of people. These are the only ones in the world to understand your application. You are, in practice, stuck with the consultant for ever, even if you have access to the full source code.
Open source is different. Here software like Zope and Plone are developed by a large community of developers, spread over numerous companies. The only part developed by thesmall group of developers is the customizations done for your site, usually developed in a style that is common for the whole community, and easily understandable by any developer on the platform. This means that if you are not happy with us, you can take the web application we made and go to somebody else.
It means security
In a closed source application, you can find security holes only by testing. In open source, the security is both tested, and maintained by scrutinizing the source code by all the developers. If somebody finds a security hole in a closed source software, the only ones that can fix that are the company that developed the software. If somebody finds a security hole in an open source software, anybody can fix the problem. This is why open source operating systems are more secure than closed source systems.
These are the reasons that Colliberty is not only firmly committed to open source, but only recommend open source software all the way. Although we don't mind working on Windows, we recommend Linux and Apache over Windows and IIS. Because we know we get back if we give, and because it gives us freedom and security.
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