What do you think of the OSS offering compared to the commercial product? Will you continue to use the OSS product? Why or why not?
Download a popular, end-user version of an OSS tool that competes with a desktop application that you own, or that you’ve used (hint: choose something that’s a smaller file or easy to install).Are the OSS efforts you identified above provided by commercial firms, nonprofit organizations, or private individuals? Does this make a difference in your willingness to adopt a particular product? Why or why not? What other factors influence your adoption decision?.Are there open source alternatives for these categories? Are well-known firms leveraging these OSS offerings? Which commercial firms do they compete with? Make a brief list of commercial product categories that an individual or enterprise might use. Free BSD and Sun’s OpenSolaris-open source versions of the Unix operating system.Asterix-an open source implementation for running a PBX corporate telephony system that competes with offerings from Nortel and Cisco, among others.SugarCRM-customer relationship management software that competes with and Siebel.
MySQL, Ingres, and EnterpriseDB-open source database software packages that each go head-to-head with commercial products from Oracle, Microsoft, Sybase, and IBM.Zimbra-open source e-mail software that competes with Outlook server.Marketcetera-an enterprise trading platform for hedge fund managers that competes with FlexTrade and Portware.
lists over two hundred and thirty thousand such products 1! Many of these products come with the installation tools, support utilities, and full documentation that make them difficult to distinguish from traditional commercial efforts (Woods, 2008). Just about every type of commercial product has an open source equivalent.