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Who's afraid of Open Source in 2013?

Recently I have read this article (http://tinyurl.com/d3lnxns) and the related comments on ComputerWeekly.com and then I asked myself (for the billionth time):"Why the hell in 2013 are there still people frightened by Open Source?". Some governments and big organizations are discovering belatedly the advantages of Open Source software adoption, after wasting a lot of money on license purchasing and above all on maintenance, bug fixing, support and customization (wasting a lot of time too (and time is more precious than money)) . It's sad to see that in some cases the choice of Open Source is just because someone thinks that it's cheaper than proprietary: Open Source means also the possibility to reduce the learning curve of a software, to quickly discover and fix possible bugs, to find a way to improve or extend the code (no lock-ins as for the proprietary), to have a large community to share tips and suggestions, to improve your personal knowledge and to find often a better quality. I am no dogmatic about Open Source: if a proprietary solution is well coded and stable, suits fine my business requirements and grants me a real, efficient and prompt support I have no problems to adopt it. But each time there is a good Open Source alternative I prefer this one for the reasons above. Furthermore I think that companies should decide to reinvest in people a big part of the money saved by adopting Open Source solutions: people are the real value of a company.

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