I’m been tasked with writing a presentation on the “Dynamics of Open Source.” Â I’ll be co-delivering the talk at the MPower Open User Conference next week. Â Why I’m doing this talk is another story for another post.
 Anyhow, there is so much to say on this subject.  I was hoping to solicit some feedback from some of my readers.  The most common stuff people say about open source, “lower total cost of ownership”, “it has less bugs”, “improves faster, new features added faster”, etc, etc.
What do you like about open source software/tools? Â What don’t you like? Â How has it helped/hurt your organization?
Thanks…
In giving a balanced presentation, be sure to mention that O/S is a mixed bag. Some projects are solid (Spring, Hibernate, Tomcat) and some are crap (I won’t mention any names here, but oh how I want to)…and there’s a wealth of projects that fall somewhere in between. The same is true of support…some have great support, both from the community and from the developers. Others have no community and only one developer who doesn’t have time to answer your e-mails. (Note that the quality of the project is a different dynamic than support…I’ve seen some solid projects with no support and vice-versa).
The down side is that it takes a development team with a solid understanding of Java and a certain skill level to be effective. There are a million videos, tutorials and books which can teach about any dumb VB programmer how to write a website in ASP.NET. There is not the same ease of adoption for the open source tools, especially the complicated stuff.
So good teams can be extremely successful with an open source stack, while mediocre teams should probably stick to the easy, vendor-supported stuff.
Craig and Tim,
Thanks for your input. It was all valid and will definitely be incorporated into the presentation.
Erik