Integrate

Commercial, proprietary software and open source software have very different motives when it comes to integration. Commercial software succeeds by ensuring more and more functionality is completed on its proprietary software, not on someone else's. This leads most commercial software vendors to make it relatively easy to pull data from other systems into the platform, at the same time limiting the amount of data and the level of APIs to extract data and rules from the platform.

With Open source projects, it is an entirely different story. Open source software succeeds partly by being integrated more to other software than any competitors. It is on this basis that market leadership is partially determined. This leads most open source software to be very open and standards-based – both in theory and practice; qualities that lead to easier integration and lower costs.