Open source VS closed source is one of the area of discussion for any computer guys, most of the academic person will always would go for a open source software reason, less legal issues and gets stuff for free, but corporate guys would fight that if every software is made open source then how would they make money.
For Open source the pros is that its for free and that it has such a large community that any bugs would be fixed easily. Open source has Crowd sourcing power.
The cons say that open source has very least security because it can be tampered by anyone, if the open source software is used by masses then some evil computer guy can tamper the code with the virus and there can be a judgement day like situation in the future.
For close source the pros is that's the software is developed by professional not by some amateurs so the software would be of best quality and it would work great.
Cons for closed source is that its found more bugs and a long time to come up with the patch.
From the time the computer was invented many guys took computer as a research subject and software developed was open source in nature because no one had the costly hardware, but as the hardware got cheaper the cost of the software development increased and that led to the era of closed source.
I have nothing against closed source, because of closed source there have been such a great companies like Microsoft, Apple and great personalities like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
But open source has got Dennis Ritchi the chacha of all the computer without whom there is no c or unix, Linus Tarvolds the Linux guy, Andrew S. Tanenbaum the Minix guy.
But now the time is changing Microsoft is the one of the biggest contributor for Linux Kernel, Linux and Minix is gaining the ground and many are having it as the main OS. There are many open source software. But now there is another type of companies which make money out of open source software like Red Hat, Ubuntu, Suse Linux etc. these companies creates the whole package out of open source and provides service and support to the customer so that customer don't have to crack their brain for compiling the linux packages and installing them. They provide services by charging a very small fortune for the business but for any normal user its free.
The future would be the combination of closed and open source, where a company would have all its software open source but would provide the service and support to the company who would provide money.
