Question

Would you suggest open source software (OSS) for an organization or sector where the performance is the factor of utmost importance, such as Military?

You must be aware that military has different software needs than the commercial sector because of its unique mission and environment. While commercial sector chooses software on the basis of factors like: application choice, ease of use, service and support, price, reliability and performance, the military does the same depending upon factors like: reliability, long-term supportability, security, scalability and performance of the software.

Keeping in mind the above scenario, answer the above question with a proper justification. Give example of a software, if you are recommending one.

Answer 1

Open source software has features such as being freely available, having no license restrictions on how it can be used, being able to alter and distribute it, and more. However, none of these qualities is sufficient to recommend this software as the best option. Not every OSS is scalable, secure, or offers long-term support. As a result, we are unable to suggest any OSS software without question. This also holds true for proprietary software.

Therefore, we can only suggest software to the military that has qualities like security, scalability, and performance, coupled with a strong support base in the form of community development groups, etc. Therefore, the military can be advised to use an OSS software suite with all the aforementioned functionalities, such as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).