| # Open Source Projects: Thoughts, Preferences | |
| Sometimes, especially in the realm of emerging technology, open source projects spring up before commercial projects do. | |
| In general, I love exploring open source technology and although I realize that this is an unreasonable expectation given that open source software is often offered for free, I definitely appreciate software that "works". I much prefer using software that is irregularly updated but has gone through good quality control than software that has gone through less good quality control and is full of bugs. | |
| As a writer and process-based thinker, documentation is another thing that I really appreciate. | |
| Clear installation instructions are always appreciated as well as well-documented features and good API documentation. | |
| When considering using an open source component in a stack, my main question is often not "is this the best tool for the job?" (among what might be a very long list of alternatives), but "is this project going to stick around and be stable?" | |
| To answer that question, it's often worth looking at who's participating in the project. The backing of technology platforms, major tech vendors, bolsters my confidence significantly. | |
| A red flag that crops up somewhat frequently is what has been termed "benevolent dictatorships" in which decision-making is decentralized to one individual or community input is discarded and devalued. | |
| Collaborative projects that have a long-term stable vision are a good fit. | |
| One misgiving I have about open source, having contributed to a number of projects and open sourcing a lot of my own thinking and work, is that it's inherently unsustainable in a world where everyone, including me, has to pay their rent in dollars. | |
| Maybe for that reason, I very much like the idea of companies which have a strong SaaS product and a parallel open source offering that they offer to the community as a goodwill gesture or to encourage wider use and participation. I would regard this as almost the gold standard and the model of open source that I think is most sustainable. So projects that follow this model are ones that I really appreciate. |