Long gone the days, when entire technical community depended solely on the commercial vendor’s to provide them with quintessential tools to help manage their day-2-day work assignments. Since the birth of Open Source community, there’s been a revolution or as I might put it – modern war between the Commercial and Open Source philosophy.
Linus Torvalds (chief architect of Linux kernel) has been quoted as saying, “”the future is open source everything” and I’m a huge believer of that. This doesn’t mean that I hate commercially available software. I’ve used lot of commercial tools in my IT experience and appreciate all the hard work put in to develop these. They have helped me to a large extent over the years. However, as many I’ve also faced hurdles that come along with using these commercial tools. This gap is filled in by Open source to an extent.
This blog is about pointing out few Merits and De-Merits of using Open Source Tools. So, let’s begin:
Merits:
1. It’s FREE, everyone likes free stuff..Isn’t it !… 😉
2. Available Source Code
3. No steep learning curve
4. Lot of plugin’s readily available to extend the tool’s feature
5. Open source community support. Someone would have already faced the issue and resolved it which you’r currently facing.
6. Easy integration with Third party software. Hassle free, most of the time.
De-Merits:
Doesn’t always have all the capabilities/features like a commercial tool. Though, serves basic needs.
Following are some of the tools I’ve either used or will be using in near future to an extent.
Commercial – LoadRunner, Quick Test Professional (QTP), Rational Performance Tester (RPT), Performance Center, Sitescope, Business Availability Center (BAC), Introscope
Open Source – JMeter, Selenium, Open STA
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