What Are The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Open Source Software Compared To Standard Commercial Software?

1) Open source software is non-proprietary. Meaning that nobody owns the code. It also means that anyone has the right to look at the code and change it. Commercial software does not allow its user to look at or alter their code, this is like someone not allowing you to look inside of your car to see how it works. You also would not be able to change any of the parts if they are broken of poorly designed.
In short open source software is free! Free as in speech not as in beer.
2) Imagine a million monkeys on a million typewriter… eventually you might get Shakespeare. Open source software can capitalize on this concept… Firefox is able to be very secure and bug free because it has thousands of people looking at the code everyday… if one person finds a bug they can fix it and submit if to a repository and have the rest of the software patched.
The disadvantages of open source software… if you do not have good version control it is possible that people will break your software.
It is also possible for the software to become bloated and lose focus of what is does. i.e. people start adding all sorts of unnecessary features to a simple program. I cant think of an open-source example… but a commercial example of a simple program that has unnecessary features is Microsoft Word(you can use it as a Visual Basic compiler… WTF?). Since the commercial products are usually about 400 times more bloatware(Windows, Adobe Acrobat, Internet Explorer) than the open source alternatives… I dont really see this as a problem.

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