Technical Support

Most users of commercial software expect that the software company will provide technical support when the program does not perform as expected. The level of support available, especially at no cost, varies widely. We have all experienced the frustration of complicated phone trees and long hold times, inexperienced support personnel or being limited to email support only. It's one of the reasons that computer user groups, like ours, are still alive. And if the software lacks a particular feature you need, try to get the software company to add it for a limited market. Right!

In contrast, open source projects rely primarily on online user forums for support. Users are free to search the forums for answers and failing in that, to post questions and problems. They may be answered by a member of the project team or by any of the other users who are willing and able to help. This is a major part of what binds the user community together. It is not unusual to see one user post a question only to be followed by several others with the same problem and then by a user who has found a solution. There are users who have posted thousands of answers to questions by others. If you have contributed a modification or add-on to the program, it is generally expected that you will provide some support for it via the forum.

In addition to any user documentation or manuals which may be provided on the project website, there is also an open source project, FLOSS Manuals, which offers user written manuals for many of the popular OSS programs.

Security and Reliability

One of the major concerns for any user of software is whether that software will function reliably and is, and will be maintained, free of security flaws.

There is debate over the security of free software in comparison to proprietary software. A popular quantitative test in computer security is using relative counting of known unpatched security flaws. Generally, users of this method advise avoiding products which lack fixes for known security flaws, at least until a fix is available. Some claim that this method is biased by counting more vulnerabilities for the free software, since its source code is accessible and its community is more forthcoming about what problems exist.

Free software advocates rebut that even if proprietary software does not have "published" flaws, flaws could still exist and possibly be known to malicious users. The ability of users to view and modify the source code allows many more people to potentially analyze the code and possibly to have a higher rate of finding bugs and flaws than an average sized corporation could manage. Users having access to the source code also makes creating and deploying spyware far more difficult.

David A. Wheeler has published research concluding that free software is quantitatively more reliable than proprietary software.