On more than one occassion, I get into argument with people supporting OpenSource / FSF software. Its not that I do not approve of Free software.. on the other hand I am quite an enthusiastic supporter of sites such as SourceForge, CodeProject, CodePlex and Google Code. Its the attitude of the people I talk with, that gets to me... they seem to think that just because the software is free, it is automatically better than any paid software. Worse are the allegations that because the code is community supported, it automatically makes them more stable and robust. One such similar debate that I recently had was a comparision of Sharepoint with an Open Source CMS. The person's theory was that many corporations were now using this product, it automatically made the product the best choice. I am yet to see a major corporation to completely replace their commercial software with open source alternatives. Open source is an attractive solution to small scale businesses whose budget is highly constrained. Even if that were the case, in this particular argument it had no strength simply because comparing an Open Source CMS with Sharepoint is jus plain wrong. While sharepoint can perform the duties of a CMS (and quite reliablely I might add) it is much more than just a CMS. Sharepoint is a set of services or rather a framework of services which are designed to perform a number of tasks including that of a CMS. An OpenSource CMS, or atleast the ones I have had the opportunity of seeing are more user oriented in terms of their backend administration. They have a clean and easy to use backend to simplify things for an administrator who doesn't have any experience in dealing with code and such complexities. Sharepoint on the other hand is more like clay .. you can mould it into whatever you want. You can even develop a user friendly administrative backend for a custom web service that you have just developed. You can integrate your existing services with more Microsoft products such as Dynamics and manage all your Microsoft Office documents. Can any other open source CMS claim to do all of this? I haven't seen one yet. Sharepoint Services also consists of Search Server, which allows you to build your very own personalized search engine for documents and such.  

Furthermore support is a major issue in open source software. If something goes wrong, then there is no single place where you can go to resolve the issue. With microsoft, all it takes is one single email for help to their support help desk. Many people claim that there are one too many bugs with Microsoft products. Again, if there is a bug, Microsoft promptly issues a fix to the problem. With the open source community there is no set deadline for fixing issues. The developer might be on an idefinite hiatus from development while you are stuck with a broken service/product which is affecting your clients or your own business. Atleast with Microsoft most of the bugs are documented. With open source software there might be issues which have been found but no one has reported yet. If there is a bug in a service I am making use if, I would atleast like to know that is exists so that I can possibly work around it while a fix is being developed.. with open source there is no such possibility unless the developers can come up with a fix or a solution to workaround the problem. Sure other contributors can make suggestions, but how do you trust an uncertified unknown stranger giving you advice to fix a critical service instrumental to your business or to your customer?

 I am not trying to say OpenSource software is not good enough. I am just trying to say that a comparision between an open source CMS and sharepoint is really not fair since Sharepoint is so much more than just a simple CMS. Its purpose is so much more different than that of a CMS.  They both have their advantages and their disadvantages and they are more or less suited to rather specific situations in my opinion.