Aseem Sharma

Thanks for your feedback tracyanne. The purpose of this article is to address the issues surrounding adoption of open source software and address the same. As reflected in the title now, it offers open source as an alternative for small businesses.

Thanks again for your inputs.

Hans, thanks for the feedback. The idea is to address the issue pertaining to the mindset of a large number of small scale businesses that do not even look out for open source solutions. The premise was based on the experience and observations with some small scale businesses recently who 1. do not even know that open source solutions exist, 2. who know but still would not use it due to some of the reasons mentioned in the article.
I think if you can change that mindset, address some common misconceptions and then showcase open source solutions (in form of successful case studies) in various categories/line of businesses, you can increase the adoption. This mindset, in fact, is a real problem that faces the software world in general and open source world in particular.

The point here is that open source is an alternative to proprietary software and is as safe, secure and robust as proprietary.. There are a lot of business people who think that one needs to trade off features/quality/security for low cost when it comes to using oss and one of the purposes of the article is to correct that thought process.

Word processing, as an example is one of the most common applications that a substantial number of small scale businesses use, including the one's who have very little to do with technology. It is the widespread use of Word processors that make it tempting to use it as an example here to address the issue in context.

Thanks again for your feedback.