ABOUT OPEN SOURCE

Proprietary, closed source, software code is a closely guarded secret.

Code review is limited to the owner; flaws are not readily discovered and fixed.

Companies that control closed-source products have a strong profit motive to suppress information about flaws and to fix them through for-fee "upgrades" rather than free patches.

Thus, commercial products often languish with severe problems for years, especially incompatibility and security holes.

To prevent customer flight when a large number of flaws are discovered, the most powerful closed-source software vendors create products which interoperate only with other closed products from the same vendor or its partners, making migration to superior products and open systems a difficult and expensive process.

Non-proprietary, open source, software code publishes code freely for everyone to use, improve, and extend.

Popular and widely-used open source packages have the benefit of thousands of programmers testing, developing, hardening, and improving them at every step.

As a result, open source packages consistently grow and have flaws fixed faster than closed competitors.

This approach yields the most feature-rich and secure products available today.

Some commercial software providers have begun to integrate open source components into their applications (IBM, Sun, and Microsoft).

• Microsoft has incorporated the open source zlib compression library into major applications such as Microsoft Office, DirectX and Internet Explorer.
• IBM is using Linux to replace legacy operating systems across the entire range of IBM minicomputers and mainframes.

Neosynapse takes the approach of leveraging open source modules to its logical extent, using them as much as possible to minimize the use of closed source.

Neosynapse products are based on the most respected names in open source software (Linux, Apache, BSD, Python).

Since open source products are used by a wide audience, they solve general problems. Assembling open source components alone would not create a product that solves a complex business need, such as revenue assurance.

For this reason, Neosynapse uses a proprietary middleware layer based on popular programming languages such as Java and Python to weld open source modules together into a single enterprise application.

This allows Neosynapse to take full advantage of all fixes and feature upgrades in the open source community while still delivering focused, powerful solutions for your business.