4 ms·
This is key. Extremely many "OSS" projects are also not up to quality standards and require significant engineering time for understanding, auditing and perhaps
by 2ion 6y ago
This is key. Extremely many "OSS" projects are also not up to quality standards and require significant engineering time for understanding, auditing and perhaps integrating the thing, even before deploying it. The bigger the set of useless features on a project, the bigger the risk in introducing an unknown into the critical paths that allow you to ship/provide a product/service. While many global "base" technologies like Postgres, enterprise Linux, Redis, NodeJS, Tomecat, the JDKs, etc are solid lighthouse projects with better quality than what "just writing your own" without world-class engineering teams and investment could produce in a reasonable amount of time, many others are just not that good. The cost of "adopting" a 2nd- or 3rd-rate FOSS solution may be very high and introduce significant technical debt down the road.
In way to many companies, engineers (including engineering managers) have to explain to a non-technical C suite that OSS/FOSS IS NOT FREE and NOT GUARANTEED TO BE CHEAPER than going with proprietary or self-written, minimal, tested and concise solutions in any given context. They can be, of course, and with some engineering investment they can be for the longest time in the feature, but every case is different and a "wave" certainly is not what just removes the need to do this kind of evaluation.
- em-bee 6y agoi disagree that extremly many Free Software or Open Source projects are not up to quality standards. i use them every day and 95% is of high quality. higher than many closed source applications or libraries. this is not a FOSS question. (i would not touch a closed source library as s potential dependency with a 10 foot pole. it's either FOSS or i write it from scratch) this is a question of the ability or willingness to adopt and maintain 3rd party dependencies. fear of FOSS could be added as another reason, but that reason is even worse than mere unwillingness to work with other peoples code. in order to use a 3rd party application or library as a dependency you must be able or willing to maintain it yourself, in case you run into an issue with its support. (that's one of the big points of FOSS, btw) you are right about unnecessary features being a risk, but again, that has nothing to do with FOSS as a choice.