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1. There are many benefits of the Open Source software model adopted by Mozilla.

ID: 3677606 • Letter: 1

Question

1. There are many benefits of the Open Source software model adopted by Mozilla. If you were a Kurdistan computer user, which of these benefits would be most valuable to you? Support your answer.

a. Due to a large open source community of people, software can be tested much more thoroughly than would be possible for any one company.
b. A large open source community can provide greater input into the design and development process
c. Volunteer programmers can supplement internal programmers by writing code for various pieces
d. Design decisions can be driven by people’s needs instead of by market and economic factors

2. Given the benefits of Open Source software, take a few moments to think about the Heartbleed bug found in the OpenSSL cryptography library. If the software had been commercial software, the discovery may have never happened or been greatly delayed, and the seriousness of the bug could have been covered up to protect the company. Given this, is the bug and its detection a failure of the Open Source model? Support your choice.

a. Yes
b. No

Explanation / Answer

1. There are many benefits of the Open Source software model adopted by Mozilla. If you were a Kurdistan computer user,

Due to a large open source community of people, software can be tested much more thoroughly than would be possible for any one company.

It’s generally free – it has been estimated that open source software collectively saves businesses $60 billion a year. These days for virtually every paid for proprietary software system you will find an open source version.

2. It’s continually evolving in real time as developers add to it and modify it, which means it can be better quality and more secure and less prone to bugs than proprietary systems, because it has so many users poring over it and weeding out problems.

3. Using open source software also means you are not locked in to using a particular vendor’s system that only work with their other systems.

4. You can modify and adapt open source software for your own business requirements, something that is not possible with proprietary systems.

2) No

Because

Open-source software is free to use, distribute, and modify. It has lower costs, and in most cases this is only a fraction of the cost of their proprietary counterparts.

Open-source software is more secured as the code is accessible to everyone. Anyone can fix bugs as they are found, and users do not have to wait for the next release. The fact that is continuously analyzed by a large community produces secure and stable code.

Open source is not dependent on the company or author that originally created it. Even if the company fails, the code continues to exist and be developed by its users. Also, it uses open standards accessible to everyone; thus, it does not have the problem of incompatible formats that exist in proprietary software.

Lastly, the companies using open-source software do not have to think about complex licensing models and do not need anti-piracy measures like product activation or serial number.