Promoting open source technology to increase productivity of small and medium enterprises

The use of open source software (OSS) offers several advantages such as cost savings, security and the ability to modify the source code [1], which encourages companies to adopt it. Today there is a large number of OSS available that meet different requirements (Feller, and Fitzgerald, 2002) [2] [3], which makes their selection a very difficult stage. The contribution of this work is to develop our national economy, by proposing a new evaluation model that will facilitate to decision- makers of small and medium enterprises in Morocco and in other countries to improve the productivity by enhancing their information system with open source technology. To test and validate our proposed model, we applied it at a Moroccan company that sells heavy equipment and wished to supervise the IT infrastructure of its subsidiaries in Africa using a scalable and free solution, and also at nineteen small and medium companies.