The curse and bane of open source software

With the economy starting to go in recession and IT spending becoming tighter, more and more people are starting to look at open source software as a viable option. New business solutions that are being developed focus more on technology and tools that are freely available rather than having to go for paid technologies/frameworks.. Linux is in the spotlight more now and traction behind open source technology is getting more and more traction..

On the other hand, there is this curse of open source software.. They have no sort of liability with respect to your project. In the sense that if the group developing the software decides to shut shop and stop developing the particular product and disperse, you are.. well.. done for it.. I was witnessing this particular scenario in a project that i was involved in some way in the past.. The powers that be had decided that the particular project was past its prime and for other reasons best known to them decided to stop developing the product and worser made the team working on that project focus on other products.

The effect was that, new bugs that came in were not addressed, critical ones were left unclaimed.. Queries on forums and mailing lists were left unanswered. After a while when the releases stopped coming out, people got concerned and started questioning the future of the product. Unfortunately there was no one responsible for that particular product to answer the queries and hence, projects which were gone into production using this particular product were left hanging with the sword above its head.

This is not the only instance i am sure. I have heard other instances of products getting affected because the excellent open source software solution that they were using has stopped further development and support. The reason: They do not have enough money to sustain their development because none of the users that are using the product have given back any monetary benefits to the particular product that they are using..

So, the more important thing than going open source is to find out a product that will actually survive through your product development lifecycle and support cycle. If not, you can be sure that you will have the rubber chicken in your hand..