"Forking" Greatest Danger of Adopting Open Source?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday December 9, 2003 @02:34AM from the forking-is-better-than-abandonment dept.

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.

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Forking commercial software by holygoat · 2003-12-09 02:41 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.