Voiceroute, a software PBX vendor, originally started as a proprietary software company but went (at least partly) open source earlier this year. In this video, CEO Ming Guang Yong says the company should have moved toward open source "a lot sooner," and explains why.

IT managers often assume that open source software is more secure than proprietary commercial software. Anyone who uses open source can examine the original code to spot any lurking vulnerabilities, and potentially even fix the vulnerabilities themselves. With proprietary software, you have to trust the vendor to do it all for you.

In the ongoing debate between open source purists and people who appreciate and defend proprietary software, extremists will always have their voices, but many people in the open source community are waking up to the fact that proprietary platforms and applications can co-exist peacefully with open source ones.

At first glance it might seem like a no-brainer: Get your intranet software and its source code for free or pay big bucks for proprietary, closed source software. But deciding to adopt either open source or proprietary software must go beyond the issue of money.

Open source software is successfully displacing proprietary applications in many large companies and eating into the annual revenues of proprietary software vendors by $60bn per year, according to research.

Tim believes that open source, at least as defined by open-source licensing, has a short shelf life that will be consumed by Web 2.0 (i.e., Web companies hijacking open-source software to deliver proprietary Web services) or by traditional proprietary software vendors.

According to an old saying, when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. That, however, does not seem to apply in the proprietary software business, because as we have seen over the years, whenever a proprietary software vendor falls on tough financial times, it closes shop and releases its products under an open source license.

Open source has a lot of advantages. For starters, the license is free, which means you take a huge part of the expense out of the equation, but just because the license is free doesn't mean the entire implementation is. You still have to learn about it, set it up, possibly customize it, roll it out, train your users and so forth, just as with any enterprise software.

The non-technical public will care very little about access to the source, not realising what degree of freedom this guarantees to them, even if they never look at the source themselves. Same with open data standards. Why change or even care if all the world seems to use the same 'standard' of some proprietary software package, right?