What are the pros and const of OSS or open source software?

OSS I have experienced to be a great way to get hold software when specific engineering
software is not available and has been a great resource to tap into. One great advantage is
that I get to use the software without worrying about licensing and as long as you don’t
need to update and your intended requirements are full filled, example would be some of
the structural calculations that are repetitive and remains always the same for most of the
projects.

For OSS its often there is no need for licensing or per use fees that I have to worry about and
can be used in multiple systems at home office and on my laptop.

Being an engineer quite often the OSS software used need to be modified for specific use.
With even basic coding knowledge it easy to modify things like the units of measurements
and some similar minimal changes as the code is easily accessible.

On a personal note when I changed my laptop from a window based one to a mac about 8
years back the like of MS word and similar were not widely available on mac platform and
had to use apps like OpenOffice [ CITATION Apa14 \l 1033 ] for mac. At the general user
level these can be very similar in use to Microsoft office.

One difficulty that was faced was in saving files as the open office saves file to a open office
source file where else Microsoft office packages saves file in a specific way hence more
often than not just by clicking save I end up saving the wrong file not do not relies it till I try
to search for a earlier file. Hence the learning curve involved with each software can be a
disadvantage.

On the same issue with the transition to a mac AutoCAD was not natively available on mac
in 2005 and had to rely on OSS software LibreCAD [CITATION lib11 \l 1033 ], which is like cad
and very similar file interface.

A disadvantage of using OSS is that you are very much on your own when it comes to
problems. There is no call center or similar to call to and more other[CITATION lib11 \l 1033
\m Apa14] than not it is not easy to figure out where u went wrong.

To this day I am using OSS software to view Microsoft project files as although Microsoft
office suite has been released now for macs the MS project has not been released. I am
using OpenProject [ CITATION Ope16 \l 1033 ] for viewing of project files and have made
some changes to update task progress on the source code. Interestingly I started with
OpenProject 3.0.0 and the developer has been offering updates and currently I am using
OpenProject 8.0.0 although a new version is also available (9.0.2) as I found out when I
checked there site for referencing for this write up.

So as explained above there are advantages and disadvantages in OSS. Above is a personal
experience of OSS.
Bibliography
Comunity, l., 2011. libreCAD. [Online]
Available at: https://librecad.org
[Accessed 2 June 2019].
Office, A. O., 2014. OpenOffice. [Online]
Available at: https://www.openoffice.org
[Accessed 2 June 2019].
OpenProject, 2016. Open Project. [Online]
Available at: https://www.openproject.org
[Accessed 2 June 2019].