Prospect Magazine – Britain’s Intelligent Conversation

For many popular desktop applications, such as word processors, open source software often follows the innovations made in proprietary software. And so Microsoft Word remains a more polished product than its open source rivals. But it is by no means clear that all buyers, especially organisations, choose software solely on the basis of their technical merits. What an open source application may lack in refinement, it may make up for in its friendly licensing regime, its ability to run on older or cheaper computers or the fact that its users are not dependent on the strategic choices of a single company-Microsoft, Oracle or whoever.