BSA Study Demonstrates Open Source's Economic Advantage

jrepin writes "The fundamental premise of the latest Software Alliance study — that licensed, proprietary software is better in many ways than pirated copies — actually applies to open source software even more strongly, with the added virtues that the software is free to try, to use and to modify. That means the potential economic impact of free software is also even greater than that offered by both licensed and unlicensed proprietary software. It's yet another reason for governments around the world to promote the use of open source in their countries by everyone at every level."

Comments

Re:It's about liability and responsibility of faul

[Todd Knarr]

How does commercial software give you anyone to pin liability on? All of it that I've seen either disclaims liability entirely or limits liability to refunding your money (even from major vendors like Oracle it reads like "if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces"). You definitely won't be able to hold the vendor liable for the cost of lost business due to the failure of their software. Sure it gives you someone to blame, but you're still left holding the bag when it comes to the actual money the failure cost you. At least with open-source software, if the failure's bad enough the business can put it's own resources to work fixing it. Contrast that with commercial software where the business has no choice but to sit and wait for the vendor to decide the problem's important enough for the vendor to fix it.