# Get organized with these 6 open source tools

Managing hundreds of disparate, asynchronous commits and bug reports doesn't happen by accident. 
Fortunately, there are applications out there designed to help with that sort of thing, and many excellent open source projects serve as examples of not only how to organize a project, but also how to organize a project using open source tools.
With so many tools on the web being offered as services, though, there's more to getting organized than just choosing the most convenient online vendor.
You have to think of your system of organization as part of your product, whether that's personal productivity or a software project you ship to hundreds or thousands of users.
If your product is open source or free culture, then it's time to consider basing it upon open source.

Using open source isn't a matter of brand loyalty.
Open source is about you owning the tools that enable you to do what you do.
Here are some of the ways your favourite projects benefit from using open tools to produce open source.

## Data exchange and interchange

It's rarely profitable for proprietary tools to provide you with data dumps.
Some products, usually after a long battle with their users (and sometimes a lawsuit), provide ways to extract your data from them.
But the real issue isn't whether a company lets you extract data, it's the fact that the capability to get to your data isn't guaranteed in the first place. 
It's your data, and when it's literally what you do each day, it is, in a way, your life. 
Nobody should have primary access to that but you, so why petition a company for a copy?

Using open source tools ensure that you have priority access to your own activities.
When you need a copy of it, you already have it. 
When you need to export it from one application to another, you have complete control of how the data is exchanged.
If you need to export your schedule from a calendar into your kanban board, you can manipulate and process the data to fit.
You don't have to wait for functionality to be added to the app, because you own the data, the database, and the app.

## The right to not upgrade

Tools change.
It's the way of things.

Change can be frustrating, but it can be crippling when a service changes so severely that it breaks your workflow.
A proprietary service has and maintains every right to change its product, and you explicitly accept this by using the product.
If your favourite accounting software or scheduling web app changes its interface or its output options, you usually have no recourse but to adapt or stop using the service.
Proprietary services reserve the right to remove features, arbitrarily and without warning, and it's not an uncommon practice for companies to start out with an open API and strong compatibility with open source, only to drop these conveniences once its customer base has reached critical mass.

Open source changes, too.
Changes in open source can be frustrating, too, and it can even drive users to alternative open source solutions.
The difference is that when open source changes, you still own the unchanged code base.
More importantly, lots of other people do too, and if there's enough desire for it, the project can be forked.
There are several famous examples of this, but admittedly there are just as many examples where the demand was *not* great enough, and users were, essentially, "forced" to adapt.
Even so, users are never truly forced to do anything in open source.
If you want to hack together an old version of your mission-critical service on an old distro running ancient libraries in a virtual machine and accessible only to you over a VPN through two different firewalls, you have the ability to do that because you own the code.
When a proprietary service changes, you have no choice but to follow.
With open source, you can choose to forge your own path when necessary, or follow the developers when convenient.

## Proprietary or independence

Proprietary services can affect others in ways you may not realize.
Closed source tools are accidentally insidious.
If you use a proprietary product to manage your schedule or your recipes or your library, then the moment you need to effectively coordinate with someone else, you're often forcing them to sign up for the same proprietary service, because proprietary services usually require accounts.
Of course, the same is sometimes true for an open source solution, but it's not common for open source products to collect and sell user data the way proprietary vendors do, so the stakes aren't quite the same.

## Download the ebook

Wouldn't it be great to be as well organized as a finely-tuned open source project, using open source tools?
In our new downloadable book, [6 open source tools for staying organized](LINK), Kevin Sonney provides tips for staying organized, getting things done, and maximizing productivity without the burden of proprietary services.