Open Source Software

A good building block must not be too costly, and it certainly needs to be reliable. For software systems, however, there is a third important requirement. The degree of control over these outside components should be as high as possible. If the operation of third party software cannot be examined or debugged (e.g. source code is not available, legal restrictions, etc.) then relying on it has a very high degree of uncontrollable risk.

The answer to all three requirements specified above are met to an extraordinary degree by Open Source Software. On the server, there is little reason not to use Open Source components exclusively. They combine low cost, high performance, maintainability, ease of use and security.

In general, the popular Open Source tools are very friendly to commercial use — which is why industry giants such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, as well as highly respected new technology companies like Google and Yahoo, have committed so heavily to such software (IBM's investment alone is in the billions of U.S. dollars).

Open Source Software is ideally suited for developing, monitoring and maintaining a LongJump application. Such software has very low startup costs, does not suffer from "planned obsolescence" that drives up the long-term costs of common proprietary solutions, and derives further advantages from its vendor neutrality.

Most importantly, Open Source offers the kind of transparency that has now been recognized (especially in the business world) as being of fundamental importance. This transparency allows Open Source tools to be correctly customized to a particular task, which further reduces costs across the entire lifecycle of a project.

Popular Open Source packages place far fewer obligations on their users than typical proprietary solutions. Organizations deploying these packages retain all the benefits of Open Source's transparency, but may still elect to keep their own work proprietary.