On Software and Reluctance to Change

Even in a large, professional, closed-source development office, open source software is held in high regard by software developers. This is countered by management's distaste for it on the grounds that "We have no one to hold accountable if it fails." But why does open source have this (well earned) reputation?

Open source, is even more evolutionary than closed source. Closed source has the advantage of being developed by a paid staff. Open source developers have a much more free range of choice of related projects to support, and the very few that are well organized, well planned, and well executed will survive. Any body can start a new web server project, but very very few will be better than Apache. In an environment without such direct competition for developer resources, a closed source solution can flounder on for years, and the developers may not even know that there is a better way! Think of it like those fish that have evolved to live in caves without daylight. Those fish are the proverbial "big fish in a little pond." But put them out in the sunlight and they'd be killed! But they do fill their niche quite well.

Open source has to have the "Wow" factor. As an outgrowth of the first point, no developer would want to work maintenance on an end-of-life project if they didn't have to. But closed source doesn't necessarily have that constraint. By tying the customer into a set of technologies, the closed source project makes changing from that vendor that much more difficult. Especially in this era of the DMCA, trying to figure out what a vendor did with your data may end up in court! There is some of that in the open source world, but once you can see the source, reverse engineering the data becomes that much easier.

Open source has a long history of being a "hobby." This is the battleship mentality of large, closed source software developments. What they fail to realize is that all those CMMI certifications don't have any correlation to producing a stable, complete product. That those hobby programmers have to have more strict controls over feature development, release schedules, etc. By its nature, open source development depends on a central core of "committers" to control all the distributed effort. Getting that help to understand its job quickly and to perform it to specification is absolutely critical to the success of the project. All the development processes are driven by that point. So being able to reassign a task to anyone who wants to work it must be able to be done with a minimum of effort by the developer and the committers.

If closed source is like a super computer, capable of mind-boggling levels of effort, than open source has the capability to be like Seti@Home, capable of performing to much higher levels of performance than ever imagined!