"Forking" Greatest Danger of Adopting Open Source?

TTL0 writes "In response to recent descisions in favour of Open Source in Israel (see here and here),Dr. Robert M. Sauer of the Department of Economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and president of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. has written a article saying that the hidden costs of OS add up to a higher TCO. However, The greater danger Sauer writes, is that of a OS project forking. "The forking of open-source projects occurs when passionate disputes between open-source software developers over product design lead to the splintering of projects into a multitude of varieties. With proprietary software, forking generally does not take place since development is centralized within a firm and disciplined by market forces."" I've always seen Forking as something of a blessing... it's the abandoned projects are the ones that are in danger.

Comments

Forking commercial software

[holygoat]

My PhD supervisor once worked at Schroders Bank. They didn't want to pay 20% of installed cost per year for an information system, so they decided to maintain it themselves.

Bad idea.

Cut to a few years later. Their own maintenance has rocketed the cost well beyond 60% of installed cost per year.
Even worse, the forking has meant that there is no upgrade path to the latest commercial version, causing the system to be an absolute millstone - and no way out.

It's a problem in the enterprise market, where custom software gets built, as well as in Open Source software.

Re:Open Source means never saying goodbye

[ccoder]

If you need it enough you can pay for it's development.

I agree. My company uses that approach with alot of things such as our customized mail servers, DNS scripts, etc. We take Bind, and add features (sure most are in shell scripts, but still..). We take Courier, and fix problems with certain domain names (mostly irrelevant to the world).

That's what I like about my job, being a evolutionist for hire, so to speak :).

Re:forking eh?

[RevMike]

Don't stake your business on a piece of OSS that you aren't sure is going to be around for awhile.

Same goes for commercial software, fork or no. What if the developing company goes out of business?

When I was working for a major global firm, and we dealt with small closed source development companies, we always had code escrow agreements. If the vendor went out of business or dropped support of the product, we had the ability to get the source and support it ourselves.

Re:Forking is the survival of the fittest!

[zmooc]

I think you're right in saying capitalism is doomed and you're right about what will cause it's doom. Only a bit more is needed to trigger it's fall: robots. Read this story if you're interested in such things; it gives a good indication of what will happen once robots become good enough to replace most jobs (which imho is inevitable) and describes a few scenarios which we might expect. The conclusion is: capitalism is doomed but it might take a few decades.