Hi, What are the pros and cons and arguments for either going the Open Source (i.e magneto) or the Proprietary route when having a website built and where does ASP.NET fit in to all this? Thanks
ASP.Net doesnt fit in it at all as there are opensource solutions and proprietary solutions developed in it. By proprietary are you technically meaning bespoke to the site owner or simply close sourced? I'll assume it is the former and naturally talking in generalities Opensource Advantages Cheaper Quicker to develop Well tested/ large user group A range of developers you can use Most common functionality is there if you "forget" about something Disadvantages You fit your business to the solution not the solution to the business Systems are slower because of the catch all nature Security is worse because of code being public Can result in site looking just like another quick buck XXXXXXXX site Bespoke Advantages Will totally match your requirements Can look 100% how you want it to Disadvantages More expensive More time to develop Requirements can be missed Can create lock in to a developer Requires significant User Acceptance Testing Of cause life is not black and white so you do also get the middle ground of people taking opensource and doing bespoke development around it plus also the closedsource solutions also sit somewhere between the two in terms of benefits/ advantages
How is this different from proprietary? False! Because it is open to the public, security problems have more eyes watching to fix it. For example, Firefox and Chrome are for more secure than Internet Explorer. Linux and BSD are far more secure than Windows.
Not sure if you have been robbed by someone when you asked for a bespoke site or are just not understanding but I dont get why you would think that something that is made you your exact specifications would require you to change how you want things to operate? Likewise, why would you ask a programmer to create subroutines for creating a RSS feed if you have no intention of ever having RSS feeds? By nature, bespoke is not going to be a catch all because it is made exclusively for you. Yes a bespoke site can look like a generic oscommerce site (if you want) but it is massively more common with oscommerce sites than bespoke - again, would imagine its fairly common sense. Dont think the browsers are the best comparison as whilst IE is closed source it isnt bespoke to each client. Opensource are simply always going to be higher risk security because anyone can look at the source code. In addition to that once you know how to hack v1.3.2 of the source code you can hack every site running it and so it is more tempting as breaking it once gives you access to hundreds of sites not just one. The second part of what your saying in terms of fixing security holes can however be true in that off the shelf solutions' security issues tend to be spoted quicker than with bespoke and fixed quicker. That however does create an overhead on everyone running the sites who need to apply patches and do regression testing. Just because holes are spotted quicker doesnt make their security rating higher.